


beyond here lies nothing

by tremontaine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Kink, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-08 17:56:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7767595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tremontaine/pseuds/tremontaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits and pieces of a vampire AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the most ridiculous mess I've ever written. I'm much too lazy to give it a plot, and anyway I'm only in it for the sexy blood drinking. There's a lot of that. 
> 
> Continuation of the last part of this: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6608539

“What did you do to me?”

He asked her for the first time just after she had turned him, and he asked her again in the clearing when the Germans were dead, after they had drunk their fill; white to the lips he’d staggered away from her, from the corpses, and fallen to his knees to retch up what was left of the contents of his stomach. Natasha had looted the dead while he threw up. She thought she heard him sobbing, and when she looked at him great helpless shudders were wracking his body. But at last he’d stumbled to his feet and wiped his face and faced her: still shaking, but calm.

“I need to get back to the Allied lines,” he said hoarsely. “My men – I have to get back.”

Natasha said, “I’ll go anywhere that’s not the Germans or the Soviets.”

“All right,” he said. “Gimme those coats. Go on.” Jaw set, face grim; he’d helped her finish looting them, and had made a makeshift bundle out of one coat for the weapons, the ammo, the few bits of food, the electric torches several of them had carried, and a spare pair of boots each. The captain had a compass on him, but Natasha was too cold to hold it steady, even though she had drunk her fill, and she had to put it down on a tree-trunk.

“What are we?” he asked, standing over her, watching the needle spin.

Natasha said, “I don’t know. They – the KGB. Made me this.” It was easier to say when she didn’t have to face those cold grey eyes. Suddenly she added, “You weren’t human when I found you. You weren’t – this – but – you weren’t human either.”

“Christ,” he said. For a moment she thought he’d throw up again. Then he said, “I hope to god I get to kill Zola myself.”

+++

Hours later, trudging through snowdrifts in the gathering dark, she finally thought to ask his name.

“Bucky Barnes,” he said; it sounded strange, even childish, to her ears. “What’s yours?”

Natalia Alianovna Romanova. What a mouthful, in comparison.

“Natasha Romanov,” she said. “Thank you for – helping me.”

“Hmm,” was all he said.

+++

She kept thinking of his face when Hydra’s men had found them: the fury and the terror and the determination. Hand to hand he had fought gracelessly: brand-new strength and enhanced agility had made up for a lack of training, or at least what she’d call training. But with a gun he was beautifully deadly, a better shot than Natasha herself, and towards the end they had moved together like a well-oiled machine, each of them excelling where the other did not.

+++

“Do we need to sleep?”

He didn’t speak loudly, but his voice startled her after the long night-time silence, and she nearly tripped in the snow.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “And eat, and breathe, and do all the things we did before. But not – not as badly, you might say.” After a few moments she said, “The healthier we are, the less blood we need. The longer we can go without drinking again, I mean. I don’t know why.”

“Like a drug,” he said. “Something that replaces… what our bodies need to function?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“How often?”

“Like this?” she said. “Probably every few days.” Even in the dimness she could see him shudder. “Ordinarily, every few weeks.”

They walked on in silence for another mile or so. The dawn was coming in the sky far above them, but here, in the trees, under the mountain-shadows, they still had a few hours to wait before there was any real light. Lucky they didn’t need it anymore… They were clambering down the steep bank of a stream that ran roughly west to the river in the ravine when Barnes said suddenly, “It was – delicious. It was the best thing I’d ever –” He swallowed convulsively, red-eyed, his hands shaking.

Natasha swallowed too. The taste of her first feed had lain rich and tantalising on her tongue for nearly three years now, and the only thing that had wiped it away was the taste of _his_ blood when she’d turned him; the lovely smell of it that had beckoned to her in the ravine was in her nostrils still. “Yes,” she said. “It always is.”

“Not them,” he said. “You – when you.” He gestured at her wrist, where she’d pressed her broken skin against his lips.

Her turn to shudder all over; she looked away. “I’m sorry I did this to you.”

“Liar,” he said, and then, to her surprise, he touched her face. “Thank you for helping me.”

She managed a smile, ever so faint, and was warmed by the way he smiled back.

+++

After that it was easier. Some tension had snapped, and they whiled the long empty miles in the forest away with talk; then jokes, and snatches of songs. Natasha found him intelligent, pragmatic, wry, and rather charming. From the way he spoke of his men, he was also loyal to a fault. Those were qualities she could appreciate. She thought he liked her too. At least, she was quite sure that he was entirely capable of leaving her if he mistrusted her.

“Where d’you mean to end up?” he asked her once.

“Anywhere that doesn’t have the KGB,” she said dryly. “I’m done with all of them.”

“London?”

“You mean, with you?”

He shrugged. “Why not? We could use your help.”

She glared at the passing landscape. “I don’t – I’m sick of fighting.”

Barnes laughed. “Kid, we all are.”

+++

They stumbled across a German patrol that evening; he didn’t throw up this time, but she saw how white he was and how he steeled himself before the fight. He wouldn’t need it. He was weak enough that instinct would take over once he was close to the soldiers, and Natasha hoped that by the time he was entirely healthy he would be… if not comfortable with what they were, at least more used to it. She showed him the mesmer, the deep seductive purr that held your victims still for the precious seconds you needed, and then – if you let them live – convinced them to forget. They stole kitbags and blankets and food, and debated taking the Jeep, but it was easier for two people on foot to hide than it was to get past road blocks and patrols in a vehicle, so they left it and struck out off the roads again, vanishing into the snowy forest.

“That mesmer thing,” he said thoughtfully. “What else can you use it for?”

“Not much,” said Natasha. “If you’re lucky you might persuade someone to answer a question. But they mostly go all loopy and tractable and dreamy, and it doesn’t last very long.”

“Well that’s both creepy and useless,” said Barnes, and Natasha was startled into a laugh.

+++

They hadn’t dared light fires since meeting the patrol. The burnt-out shell of building had probably been an inn once, a pension with a few rooms above the tavern, maybe; there were just enough walls and roof left that they could squeeze themselves into a corner and be dry. They had made a kind of nest of the coats they had taken from the dead in the ravine, and Natasha was in Barnes’ lap, mostly, her head on his shoulder, sharing their body heat.

“I couldn’t let you die,” she said quietly. “I found you by the smell of your blood and you – you asked me to finish it, and I couldn’t.” A shudder went through her. Better to die than fall into Zola’s hands again; maybe better to die than be what they were. “I’m sorry.”

He was silent for a long, long while. Finally he sighed. “You’re a very odd kind of guardian angel, Romanov.”

That made her laugh. “Thank you, I think.”

“So,” he said. “Have you got a castle somewhere in Transylvania? Am I Mina Harker, in this story? Because Steve would come and get me, but…” He trailed off; Natasha was laughing again.

“There isn’t any castle.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry.”

“But given that it’s unlikely you were born this way, I’m picturing a tall, dark and handsome Clark Gable kind of a fella climbing through your bedroom window while you slumbered in a white nightdress…”

“You _definitely_ read too much.”

“So what was it?” His voice was gentle. Suddenly Natasha was glad her view was of his shoulder and the wall behind it, not his face; those sharp grey eyes might see much more than she wanted them to.

“They named it the red room programme, which is fitting, I suppose.” She shrugged, making the coats draped over them shift about. “The idea was, or is, to create the perfect agents; the most skilled, the most obedient. Tools of the Motherland. They sent me to try and infiltrate a Nazi… offshoot, they’ve been trying to carve out some power for themselves outside of the German state – Hydra?”

“I know it,” Barnes said.

“I’m good at my job,” Natasha said. “I’m the best there is, the greatest asset the programme has produced. But they found me out… I didn’t slip up. I never slip up. But they knew, somehow, or discovered, what I am. They had some way of telling. And I found myself strapped to a lab table having my skin peeled off my bones and my mind broken apart and I realised, suddenly, that I couldn’t tell the difference between Hydra and my superiors.” This time, when she laughed, it was bitter and self-mocking. “I was lying in that cell and thinking, this is very home-like. And then I decided that if I had a chance, ever, to escape, I’d escape them all.”

“Go for broke,” Barnes said. “Good for you.” His arms tightened around her, and to her astonishment he turned his head and kissed her temple. “I’ve been on that table too.”

Natasha pressed close and hugged him back, tight as she could. Of course he had. How else to explain what he’d been when she’d found him, more than human but not yet what she was? For a little while all she could hear was his breathing, his heartbeat under her ear, the rush of blood through his veins; suddenly she remembered the taste of him very clearly, the rich, tangy iron of his blood. It made her tremble.

“Come to London with me,” he said. “Come and give the SSR everything you know; help – help us fight ‘em. I know people – Howard – maybe Howard could reverse this.”

“Not just desert, but actively betray.” Natasha rubbed at her mouth, her cold nose. “I don’t know.”

“Sure you do,” he said gently. “What are you gonna do, huh, wander around Europe forever, feeding off Nazi deserters? I have a pulse, Romanov, I breathe, I sleep, I need food – whatever this is, we’re still people. We’re still human.”

“We’re never going to age,” Natasha said quietly. “Our bodies, they don’t heal, they don’t change; we need the blood – I don’t even know why we need the blood; it feeds the magic that makes us strong and fast and lets us heal. I’m some twisted _thing_ , half-human, half monster –”

“Kid, if you believed that you’d have let me die, and flung yourself into that river while you were at it.”

“So I’m selfish and afraid,” she said. “What does that prove?”

He made an exasperated noise. “Stop _doing_ that. What have you got to prove?” And then, in an annoyed aside, “Wow, I have a type. Listen, say you’re right. What does that matter? We choose what we do, we choose who we feed off, right? So take everything they’ve done to you and turn it back on ‘em. You don’t really get a better revenge than that.”

She shifted against him, settling more comfortably against his chest. His beard brushed her forehead, his breath was on her face. They were alive in this cold chiefly because nothing but decapitation or lack of fresh blood would kill either of them, but oh he made her warm. _Take everything they’ve done to you and turn it back on them_. Tempting. But she never wanted to experience that pain again; never wanted to know she was being made mindless and had no way to fight it. Better to run…

“Is this what you do, then? Your contribution to the war effort?”

“Hmm?”

“Lie around in ravines dying and wait to be rescued by rogue Soviet agents who take pity on you and follow you home like stray puppies?”

She’d made him laugh. The sound of it, the way his chest vibrated, put a happy glow in her stomach.

“I’m with the SSR, which is… kind of Special Forces – very _Special_ Forces – for weird magic and possibly space alien Nazi experiments. My friend Steve, being an idiot with a martyr complex – well, he’s Captain America.”

She sniggered. “There’s no such – really? I thought they made him up.”

“No, he exists all right.”

“You’re the Invaders.”

“Is that what the Krauts call us?”

“And you were in that ravine on a Sunday picnic?”

“We were trying to capture Zola,” he said. “There’s a train track along the cliff-face; we had intel he was on it. God alone knows – the others must think I’m dead. I need to reach ‘em, if I can… I need to be there, to help.” It wasn’t the first time he had said that. It made her wonder if he was trying to convince himself as much as her; if there was a part of him that was as tired of all this as she was.

“Because Steve’s your friend or because you hate Zola for putting you on that table?”

That seemed to be a question he’d never asked himself before. He took a breath a few times as if to speak, but couldn’t find the words. At last he said, “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

“Hmm.”

“Come back to London with me,” he repeated. “I owe you, Romanov; let me try and repay that.”

That was touching; she smiled a little. “All right,” she said quietly. “All right. I’ll – think about it.”

+++

They slunk and snuck and scavenged their way across most of Europe over the weeks that followed, turned north or south to avoid enemies, hiding from both the current and the former occupying forces of half the continent, and if they were not… what they were, they would have probably been found and killed several times over. But they were not human, and they did survive, and slowly they grew brave enough and confident enough in their abilities to come near human settlements for food – and feeding – and pass unnoticed.

It was on one such scavenge that Barnes found the newspaper.

“My German’s crap,” he said to her, holding it out with an unsteady hand, “but this…”

Natasha bit her lip when she saw the headline. Captain America dead, supposedly, in a great victory for the _Vaterland_ ; her stomach dropped, and she remembered the aching awful cold of Nikolai’s body in her arms, the numbness of her grief.

She didn’t need to say anything. The date on the thing was already several weeks old.

“Fucking idiot,” Barnes said, struggling to keep his voice even. “Fucking little –”

“It might – it might be propaganda,” she said. “Maybe he’s got a concussion and three broken ribs, and the Nazis…”

He looked at her sharply; then he forced a smile. “Maybe.”

She touched his wrist; then she hugged him. He gripped her tight and buried his face in her hair.

+++

It was only a few days after that that they found the house – and the deserters.

“All right,” Natasha said. “That was terrible. That was pure disgusting luck. I’ve been watching this for weeks and I can’t stand another second of it. I’m not having that in a partner.”

Barnes holstered his gun, laughing. “Oh, is that so?”

“Someone needs to teach you how to move.”

His eyebrows rose. For a moment she thought he was going to come back with a dirty joke, and then he said, “You just killed a man with your thighs and you think I’m gonna say no?”

God alone knew where they were. The house was big and old and had been well-kept, once; they slung the bodies into a pit that was probably a pond in summertime, and fled back inside before the snowstorm hit, barricading the doors and windows as best they could. The, uh, former occupants had been deserters, and they’d had enough food with them for four humans to survive a week or so; they’d also cleared a fireplace, which may or may not have been smart, given what the smoke might signal to passing patrols or the nearby villages, but it had been so long since Natasha had been warm that she wasn’t sure she cared about passing patrols anymore, and they risked a hot meal and several kettles of hot water to wash in.

Then she cleared the furniture out of the biggest room in the place and settled in to teach him how to fight.

Their… condition gave him excellent reflexes as well as speed and strength, and an ability to retain muscle memory much faster than a human. She only had to show him a form once for him to know it, but putting it all together and reacting the right way in a fight took longer, of course. And – and even when he got it right…

Nikolai had been dead for nearly five years. There had been no one since. Perhaps – perhaps if they weren’t alone here, stuck inside for hours while the snowstorm rattled the windows and doors, suspended in a kind of limbo, Natasha could have convinced herself that it was a purely physical reaction; that she wanted him because he was tall and lean and graceful, because his hands were strong and his jaw was square and the way his hair fell over his forehead and into his pale, clever eyes was distractingly charming. But that was just it: he was charming. She had turned him into a monster and he had _thanked_ her for it; he had helped her and comforted her and offered her another chance at life, a chance, maybe, to find some kind of – of redemption, for what she was.

And now they were trapped in close quarters together with nothing to do but get hot and sweaty by being up close and physical with each other. The way the sweat slid down his chest was incredibly distracting, and good _god_ the man had abs.

It really wasn’t fair. In particular, it wasn’t fair that she was sitting _here_ lusting over him like this and he was standing _there_ being perfectly, impeccably gentlemanly. She was a corrupting influence in every possible way. He had not spoken about a woman, but surely there was one: some sweetly smiling child who would welcome him home with open arms and kiss his demons away, who was blonde and slender and an excellent cook who had never killed a man with her bare hands, or any other way, come to that. They were probably saving themselves for marriage. Americans were Puritans, weren’t they?

They stayed a day after the storm died down, and then another day, and another. It was safe here, or as safe as they were likely to get short of reaching Britain; they had water and what little food they needed, and it had been months, years, decades since either of them had slept in a real bed, or bathed, or – or shaved. Natasha had been headed downstairs to the kitchen when she’d seen the open door of the bathroom, and when she went to ask Barnes if he wanted anything to eat or drink she saw him standing at the mirror, a straight-razor in his hand, carefully scraping lather and hair from his cheeks.

“It’ll only grow again,” she said.

“I’m tired of looking like a tramp, ma’am, if you’ll forgive me.” He wiped the blade and flashed her a quick grin.

“Was that a hint?” Natasha took a handful of her hair and frowned at it. “It is a mess, isn’t it.”

“I can trim it if you’d like.”

She looked up. “Really?”

“No fancy styles! Just straight along the bottom. I used to cut my sisters’ sometimes, when they were little.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Pleasure.” He smiled at her again. He had such a lovely smile, and she saw it so rarely that its impact was all the greater. Natasha leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her chest, as he finished shaving, watching the muscles in his arms and shoulders, the line of his back, the curve of his ass. He could probably see her in the mirror. She didn’t know that she cared. He splashed water over his face, patted it dry, examining himself critically in the mirror, running his fingers over his chin. Natasha had an urge to kiss the cleft in it.

He was watching her in the mirror through his eyelashes. She licked her lips, unconsciously, and he grinned.

“Can I do anything for you?”

Oh god, she was blushing. Natasha looked away, his warm low laughter in her ears; all of a sudden he was very close, and she could smell him, that delicious, sun-warmed-metal smell that had beckoned to her in the ravine that day. It seemed years ago; centuries. He’d always been with her. His fingers touched her elbows, and she looked up into his face.

“What you want,” he said. “I promise I’ll sleep in the stables tonight if you don’t want me near you.” A current of suppressed amusement ran through his voice, but – but Natasha knew he meant it, too.

“What about what you want?” she said, a little challenging.

His eyes darkened, and he did something with his mouth that made her weak in the knees. “I want to take you to bed,” he said. “I want to know how you taste and how you kiss and what your skin feels like under my hands. I want to know what makes you scream, darling, how to make you feel so good you forget everything in the world except me.” Puritans, her ass. She was melting into a puddle on the floor, and he knew it, the arrogant little prick. “I want to hold you while you sleep and cook you breakfast in the morning, and I want to go back to London with you, and tell them you saved me, and see you, always, every day.”

Natasha caught her breath. She rubbed her hand over her mouth, watching him watch her, all patience, all care and understanding and willingness to walk away if she told him to, and perhaps that was what made the words rise to her lips at last. “I will. I’ll come to London with you.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “I – you were right, in the ruin that night. We choose what we do. Who we are.”

Barnes nodded. He put his hands in his trouser pockets, smiling at her, his head cocked to the right; the line of his shoulder and neck up to his jaw was a beautiful, tempting sweep. “I’m glad.”

“Me too,” she said softly, inanely, hypnotised by the lines of his body, the smell of him. His eyes. “Me too.” She unfolded her arms, her chest hollow and her limbs shivery, and reached out, slowly slowly, to put her hands on his biceps, and when he went still all over and drew in a breath that made her wonder if he loved her scent as much as she loved his, she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him.

Sweet at first, gentle, curious, but after a few minutes the angle changed, and their tongues touched, and she was so close to him he could surely feel her clothes on his bare skin, and then a switch was flipped; he backed her up against the wall, his arms tight around her shoulders, her hands digging into his hips, and they kissed as if this were their last day on earth, the last moments they would ever spend together. The world was spinning, the ground heaving beneath her feet. Heat and strength and that glorious metallic smell, the beat of his heart so close and the shape of his mouth; Natasha was dizzy, overwhelmed, overjoyed. When he lifted her she wrapped her legs around his waist at once, and he stumbled, laughing, down the corridor into the bedroom she had been using, one hand flung out to steady himself; and after weeks and months of cold ruins and abandoned barns and occasionally tree roots and rocks, they made love for the first time on a feather bed, tangled in dusty silk sheets.

+++

“I can’t call you Bucky,” Natasha said, rolling her hips luxuriously, and he groaned underneath her, his hands on her waist, his head flung back against the pillows. His eyes were closed, and that wide mouth was swollen and red with kissing; she rather liked it like that.

“Why the hell not?”

“It means _idiot_ in Russian.”

He cracked a doubtful eye open. “Lies.”

“Ask anyone.”

“I don’t know any Russians but you, kid.” His smile could keep her warm for centuries. “All right, all right. My other name is James.”

“James.” Natasha savoured it, rubbing her fingers through his chest hair, sighing as she rocked on his cock. He felt so good inside her, so incredibly good, stretching her just right, so that every time she moved sparks of pleasure ran up and down her spine. “James. James.” She brought his hands up and put them on her aching breasts, and he fondled her as she fucked him, biting his lip. “James.”

“Keep doing that and I might get used to it.” He tipped his head back again, laughing, and then caught her tight to his chest, his hands splayed hot across her back, his chest hair scratching her nipples, her sensitised breasts, beautifully. Natasha slid her hands up over his shoulders and put her palms on his smooth warm face.

“James,” she said, leaning in, brushing kisses over his mouth, gasping when he rolled his hips up to meet her, when the rhythm began to build and her thighs to tense, her body growing tight and hot. “James, James,” and suddenly her face was tucked against his neck and the warm smell of him was – the smell and the pulse of his hot delicious blood just against her nose – she opened her mouth before she’d stopped to think, just kissing at his skin, just bruising him, just, just – so close, so –

His hand cupped her head, pressed her face against his skin. “Drink,” he said hoarsely, “drink, dear heart, I’m yours,” echoing the words she’d said to him as she changed him, and Natasha drew her lips back and sank her teeth into his throat, just as she had in the ravine, and just as in the ravine he tasted the way sunlight felt on her skin, intoxicating, divine. He cried out, his body bowing underneath her, unravelling all at once, his free hand shaking as he caressed her – pushed it between their bodies – searching for her clit as they grew desperate, the rhythm erratic, more, more, until – until –

When their breathing had slowed and their heartrates settled, Natasha licked the spilled blood from his skin, sighing at the taste, kissing her bite mark as the bleeding slowed, both of them languid and drowsy with pleasure.

“That was amazing,” he murmured.

She smiled against his skin. “Good.”

“Return the favour in just a second.”

“I came,” she reassured him. Dear idiot.

“Not like _that_ you didn’t. But you will.”

Oh. Ohhhh. She could hear the grin in his voice, and thought back to the ravine again, to the shock of pleasure that had run through her when he had sucked the blood from her wrist. Did all their victims feel that, even the ones they killed? She sort of hoped not. What was the point in giving Nazis a pleasant death.

He shouted with laughter when she said that, and then he put her on her back in the sheets and crawled between her legs, where he proceeded to demonstrate a prodigious talent for pearl-diving which Natasha appreciated very, very much, and quite vocally too. James played with her till she was writhing, licking his own come out of her and kissing her labia, and when she was close he tucked his fingers inside her and put his thumb on her clit and brushed his mouth across her thigh, right over the hot pulsing artery.

“Yes?” he murmured, his breath on her agony, his fingers relentless.

“Take it,” Natasha said, “take me,” and – and – lovely flicker of pain until pleasure overwhelmed her, her body jerking with it, her mind very clear but very far away from what was happening to her, floating somewhere near the ceiling; everything was sunlight and the smell of his blood and sweet ecstasy. She wanted to drown in it, to never come back from it, his clever fingers teasing her and the lovely pulse in her thigh as he drank from her…

But the sparks faded, slowly, and her mind settled back into her body again; he was licking at his bite mark, his fingers still inside her. She put her hand to his wrist; he drew them out gently, making her gasp again. For a second he cupped her cunt in his hand, feeling her thighs twitch around him with aftershocks, and then he got back to his knees and crawled up her body, trailing kisses over her abdomen, lavishing attentions on her breasts, her collarbones, her throat. Natasha wrapped her arms around his neck as they kissed and kissed and kissed. How lovely to have him above her, surrounding her, keeping her warm…

“Kept my promise?” he murmured. She sighed in delight when he leaned on his left elbow and sent his right hand trailing down her body to press, lightly, at the bite mark; it throbbed, pleasantly sore, and Natasha rubbed two fingers across her own marks on his throat in retaliation.

“Oh god yes.”

James made a noise that sounded like nothing so much as a great cat purring. “Yeah. God, I love the way you taste, how you smell… it fills up my whole head.”

Being praised by him made her shiver, sent heat prickling over her skin. “You taste like – like summer… I always know when you’re near, you smell so good.” Their noses bumped; their lips brushed. Natasha pushed up against him, caressed his abs, wrapped her fingers around his cock, already rising again. James squeezed his eyes shut, breathing quick as she stroked him back to hardness.

“Tasha,” he said at last, all open for her and needy, and Natasha laughed quietly, tracing the veins of his cock with her fingertips, dipping down to fondle his balls. His pre-come was beginning to drip onto her stomach; she let him go to swipe her fingers through it and bring them to her mouth. Their faces were so close together that her knuckles brushed his lips.

“Oh, _fuck_.” James kissed her, her fingers trapped between her lips and his. “Natasha…” He urged her leg over his hip, settling his knees just so, his cock nestled against her cunt.

“Yes,” she said, “more, I can’t, please,” and he wrapped one arm around her back as she lifted off the pillows to kiss him, guided himself inside her; they both cried out as he stretched her again, filled her.

“So glad you’re coming back with me,” he muttered. “So good inside you, so tight and hot; eat a bullet before I leave you, follow you to Outer Mongolia if that’s what you’d wanted…”

The admission as much as the heat of him in her made her writhe and sob and kiss him harder. “Never give you up,” she said, “never.” And then, because it had been so good, so _good_ , she let her head hang back, her throat exposed to him. “Drink from me again…”

He laughed, shaky, mouthing at her neck the way she had at his before. “It really is that good, isn’t it.”

“It’s you, it’s you.” Pain; sweet little waves of pain that rippled through the pleasure and dissolved, swallowed by the hot throb of her blood as he took her, as he drank from her. “My love.” She was breathless, dizzy, barely coherent, floating in joy. “God above, we’re never leaving this bed.” And she felt him shake with laughter against her, leaning up again to kiss her, the tang of her own blood on his tongue somehow more intimate even than tasting her slick in his mouth after he’d gone down on her; it made her wild.

“Never… what, sweetheart?” He caught her wrist when she tried to pull his head back to her throat, pinned it to the mattress, fucking her hard and deep and steady. “You want more? Gonna come for me when I bite you again, gonna give it all up to me? Yeah. Yeah. Make you feel so good, Tasha. So good.”

“You do, I do, James, please, _please_.” The Black Widow, wanton and begging in the arms of a common American soldier; somewhere her mother was gouging her eyes out… But his voice, his touch, his smile; no matter what came tomorrow, no matter what happened in London, Natasha would never regret this, never.

+++

Their fourth day in the mansion dawned cold but sunny, the skies finally clear of clouds, the light on the snowy gardens around the house so bright that Natasha had to squint when she looked out the windows. Not that she was up for long; the house was cold and the bed was warm and James was warmer still, laid out invitingly across the sheets. Natasha used the bathroom, fetched them both water and some apples, wrinkled and sweet, and crawled back under the covers and into his arms. He caught her close at once, tucking her against his body. As the sheets settled over her the musky smell of sex and sweat filled her nose, and underlying it the warm iron tang of his blood, and her own. It smelt like home.

“Stay another day?” he said quietly.

Natasha nodded slowly.

“What is it?”

“You’re – all right?” She touched his face gently, pressed her thumb to the corner of his lips.

“You mean, because of Steve.”

Natasha nodded again.

He pinched his mouth, bit his lips. For a moment he wouldn’t meet her eyes; then he sighed, very slowly. “If it’s true,” he said quietly, “I can’t change it. If it’s not true, another day won’t matter.”

“When Nikolai was killed,” Natasha said slowly, “everything inside me froze up. I thought – I cried a little, and then I went back out with my unit… and it wasn’t until months and months later that I realised I’d been trying to kill myself ever since the life went out of him.” She shuddered. “The Red Rooms came not long after that… but promise me – James, if it’s true, promise me you’ll mourn him. Don’t – don’t do _that_.”

“My girl.” He kissed her forehead. “I promise – and anyway, what would be the point – I wouldn’t leave you like that.” Suddenly he laughed, a little tearful. “I didn’t know it was possible to be this happy and this messed up at the same time.”

Natasha held him fiercely tight as he chuckled, and then went still, and when the sobs came at last she stroked his hair and rocked him, whispering nonsense and love into his ear, until he quieted and kissed her gently.

+++

It was a week since they’d left their mansion when they stumbled on a village in the woods that had not been marked on any map of the area they had seen yet. Possibly this was because it was something of an exaggeration to call it a village; there was a wooden church, a few farmhouses, and what appeared to be, or have been, rather, a _Beiz_ , but several of the buildings were burnt out, and feral dogs slunk hungrily around the square, their shadows long and angry in the evening light. Natasha’s footsteps crunched on frozen mud and in little iced-over puddles, her breath icy in the air. Perhaps they could shelter here for the night. She wanted to curl into his arms again and kiss him, sleep with his heartbeat under her ear… The mansion, abandoned and ghostlike though it had been when they had found it, was a glowing golden hall of safety in her memory now, the place where she had made the happiest memory she had had in five years.

“Here, get out.” James threw a stick at one of the dogs when it got too close, but Natasha didn’t think that was necessary; the animal had already begun to shrink back. Even starving, it seemed it could tell they were not exactly human. She touched his elbow; he turned to her, blinking in the sunlight, and was about to speak when his body went very still. Natasha turned to follow his gaze. On the rickety porch of the little church, a woman was hefting a shotgun in their general direction.

“ _Wer seid ihr? Was wollt ihr?_ ” She was trying for angry and defiant, and not succeeding very well.

“We’re only trying to reach home,” Natasha said, trying to match the woman’s accent in German. “We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

After a moment, she lowered the shotgun: marginally. “There’s nothing for you here. No food – you can’t stay.”

“We won’t,” said James. His accent was atrocious, but his German was better than he’d claimed. “Can you tell us what the next town is?”

“Dead,” said the woman shortly. “The town is dead. They came… they said they were agents of the Führer at first, but they took everyone and turned them into monsters. My son…” Her voice wobbled before she sniffed and hefted the shotgun again. “The radio says the British are close. Leave. Now.”

“All right,” said James. “All right.”

“We’re going,” Natasha murmured, following him. Step by step they edged out of the square, watching the shotgun follow their movements, stumbling a little on uneven cobbles or muddy cart tracks frozen solid, until they had passed the last house, and the road turned a bend. Natasha heaved a sigh. James took hold of her hand.

“Embarrassing for that to be how it ends.”

She laughed quietly, hooking her arm through his. “Poor woman.”

“Poor all of us.” He was pensive. “Did you hear what she said – _turned them into monsters_ …”

“Hydra.”

“If we can find the base…”

“Recon, for London?”

“The radio says the British are close. We might stumble on them. It can’t hurt.”

“Unless we’re caught.”

“We won’t –” He raised his face to the sky at the same time as she caught his jacket.

“A plane.” They plunged into the undergrowth at the side of the road, slithering down a snowy embankment and crawling between the pine trees. “In broad daylight?”

He was jubilant. “Maybe the Allied front really _is_ that close.”

“ _If_ it’s a Spitfire.”

“It’s a Spitfire, kid. I can feel it in my bones.”

Natasha laughed, but he looked so hopeful she had to kiss him. They stumbled through the trees, only their enhanced eyesight saving them from a bad fall or three, as the evening deepened and the night grew dark, and above them the plane circled and circled, prowling over the whole area. Once an explosion, and several desultory shots, echoed through the valley, which were probably aimed at the plane; that might mean James was right: it was the Allies. But if so, and if it was flying over the Hydra base, they didn’t seem to have anti-aircraft guns.

The ground was climbing steadily; every now and then they caught glimpses of lights through the trees somewhere above them. The base? When, at last, the track from the village merged into a much larger and better-kept road that actually deserved the name, they found themselves on the side of a hill: to the right, the road wound down towards what seemed to be the town or what was left of it. To the left, continuing along the side of the hill, it probably led to the base. The night was growing dark, the snow-covered fields and woods glowing dimly under a sliver of moon, the shape of the valley below and the wider landscape indistinct, and all around them everything was silent, even the animals in the woods.

Natasha had come to associate that lifeless stillness with Hydra. She shivered. James was shivering too, hefting their bundle of belongings over his shoulder, but being James he wasn’t about to let that sit on him.

“What do you think?” He gestured round at the little crossroads; immediately to their left there was a rock and an uprooted tree behind it that had created a little hollow beneath it mostly free of snow. “It’s not the Ritz, my darling…” But he was already headed down the road towards the ruins of the town, walking backwards and grinning. They seemed to have walked through a cutting in a ridge of hill, crawling through the trees in the dark, and the village with the church and the poor woman with her shotgun were on the other side of the ridge.  

“I think if we stay here we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame when we’re caught and killed and tortured,” Natasha said severely, following him. The road had been mostly cleared of snow, so little chance of footprints; though it was useless to worry about those in this weather anyway. They walked quickly, slipping every now and then on patches of ice. The town wasn’t far, as the crow flew, but the winding route the road took down the hill made it longer, and it was probably close to midnight by the time they were near enough to tell that there were people there, and watch posts, and arguing, and someone singing –

“Motherfucking Vera Lynn,” said James in disbelief. “We did it. We found ‘em.” He’d stopped short in the middle of the road, eyes very wide; Natasha caught his elbow.

“Don’t stop now,” she said.

He looked down at her, his face very pale with the cold and the surprise; then he caught her chin in his hand and kissed her, as fierce and as desperate as that kiss in the bathroom of their mansion: Natasha wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. When he pulled back she followed, and the second kiss was short and sweet and warm; so was the third.

“We did it,” he said again, jubilant.

Natasha caught his lapels and kissed him a fourth time, trying to silence the squirming in her gut. They stumbled on, eagerness and hope of warmth and safety making them clumsy and heedless; their senses were such that they had heard the camp from miles away, and it seemed to take endless hours until finally they turned a last bend in the road, and someone shouted, and guns were cocked, and flashlights blazed in their faces.

“Fucking hell, you fucking incompetent fuckwits,” James bellowed into the darkness, “put those away before you fucking hurt yourselves,” and from somewhere ahead of them a man hollered, “ _Sarge_!” and someone else yelled to _get Carter now_ , and then Natasha was standing, alone and somewhat forlorn, on the periphery of what was essentially a five – or six? – way embrace: James was laughing, and being thumped on the back, and swearing at people, and everyone had asked him _how_ at least six times. After all these weeks alone with him on the road, when more than a couple other people being close usually meant that they were about to be attacked, it was overwhelming, the noise of their voices alone like being buffeted by strong winds. She stumbled a little, wishing for something to lean on, and then James’ voice said clearly, “Natasha saved me,” and half a dozen flashlights were pointed in her general direction.

“Hello,” she said, rather inanely.

“She got me out,” said James.

“My pleasure.”

“And you kept him?” said one of the men. “My condolences,” and then everyone was laughing again, and Natasha smiled too. She was squinting in the light, so she didn’t notice James come closer till he put his arm around her.

“Fellas, I need a drink, I need a meal, I need ten hours sleep. And so does she. There a base up the hill?”

“Reinhardt,” said another of his men. Natasha had to blink hard just to make out his face in the gloom. American accent; Japanese. “We’re goin’ in in the morning. It’s officially the last base.”

“Excellent,” said James. “Put me on the roster.” Then he said, “The last one?”

There was a short, ugly silence.

“It’s true?” James said quietly. “Steve’s dead?”

No one could look him in the eye. Natasha put her arm around his waist when he swayed, and someone said, “Right,” and then hands were steadying her, and they were being half-frogmarched, half carried into the camp proper.

Warm bodies, and the smell of smoke and gunpowder and the coffee on their breath; she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get her bearings. Fires, lights, tents and shelter, Jeeps standing around, men singing, a makeshift lazaret in front of which two nurses were smoking, someone was singing that song again, the one James had said was Vera Lynn. Some tension had come unravelled in her chest and with it all the tendons that controlled her limbs. Her head was swimming. Safe. She was safe. It made her dizzy; it made her want to cry. What would he tell them, about what he and she were? It would have to be everything. There was no way to explain away the fall he had had into that ravine. Where was he? A man in a bowler hat was supporting her; a coloured man had a hand on James’ shoulder, walking between her and him; suddenly a light around them, an open door, a warm room bedecked with maps; once this too had been a _Beiz_. An older man in a Colonel’s uniform, US Army, on his feet behind a table with a mug of something hot in his hand, and a dark-haired woman who yelled, “You bastard,” and flung her arms around James’ neck, fighting back tears. Someone guided Natasha into a chair; the woman had nearly knocked James over.

“Sorry I’m late, Boss,” he said tiredly, and squeezed her tight. “I would never have…”

“Shush,” she said, “I know, he knew,” and he petted her hair and kissed her temple, his face hollowed out with grief.

All of a sudden someone pushed a mug of hot coffee into Natasha’s hands; she glanced up at the Colonel.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded at her once, and then he said, “Barnes, you’re a motherfucking disgrace. _Report_.”

James straightened up; the woman – Carter, of course – stepped back, blinking hard, and James settled into parade rest and said, “Well, sir, I fell off a train,” and when he glanced at Natasha his eyes reflected the light, catlike and reassuring. And while Philips tore him a new one and his men stood around grinning and Carter smiled at Natasha and the hot coffee slid down her throat, warming her from the inside out, she thought she saw, for the first time since the red rooms – for the first time, perhaps, since Nikolai had been killed – some kind of hope in her future.

It felt good.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_seventy years later_

Natasha was asleep when he got home. Their bedroom was at the back of the house, but she’d left the light on in the study, and Bucky had seen the glow from the windows onto the terrace along the left wing as he turned into the drive. When he walked in the door he could hear her breathing, steady and slow, her heartbeat calm, and some tension in him relaxed at once. Bucky took a breath: the house smelt a little musty still, she hadn’t been home long, but her perfume lingered, and the wine she had poured, and the food she’d eaten, and above all the smell of her body and her blood, that musky rich scent that had intoxicated him for seventy years… He shivered a little, smiling to himself, glad beyond words to be near her again.

He left his bag in the front hall, his jacket on the coat rack; in the study the bottle of red wine was sitting on the table by the heavy leather couch. Bucky fell onto the couch and used the glass she’d been drinking from, not yet tidied away. That was a strange little intimacy: drinking from her discarded glass. Bucky kicked his boots off under the coffee table and put his head back, sighing. What a week; what a thoroughly exasperating… oh, why think of it. He’d finished the job, made the meet with SHIELD, and resisted the urge to send Nick a deluge of snippy text messages criticising the way he was running Bucky and Tasha’s ship: immortal, ageless mythological sort-of-inhuman beings should not be heading top-secret government spy agencies. He and Natasha had agreed on that with Peggy and Howard a long time ago. And he was home, after a long drive through the night, and his beautiful wife was upstairs, asleep in their bed, waiting for him.

Nearly a decade after he’d bought the place for her, it still gave him a thrill to walk up these stairs again. Talk about lord of the manor. And there: she’d kissed him for the first time in that doorway there, he’d stumbled along this stretch of corridor holding her in his arms, elbowing this door open and staggering inside…

It had been a stranger’s feather bed then, silk sheets and discarded possessions scattered about, dust over everything, the owners long since fled, and they had made love in a frantic delirium, too desperate for touch to savour it, snatching a few sweet moments of peace and pleasure out of the horror of the last months of the war. The second time had been better, and the third, and every time after that. Now, well. Bucky shut the bedroom door behind him silently, pausing at the foot of the bed to drink it in: the shape of her body under the covers, the fall of her hair across the pillow, her back. The blue nightdress, the swing of her shoulders, the line of her arms. The lamp was on, and her book had fallen from her hand to the mattress when she’d drifted off.

He put his knee on the mattress and crawled over her, pulling the covers down so he could kiss the strong scarred back, starting above the deep hem of her nightdress and moving up her spine inch by inch, just brushing his lips over the warm skin, breathing her scent. He’d not gone far when she stirred underneath him, sighing, and then she gave a little gasp.

“James!”

“Dreaming of me?” The top of her spine, her shoulder-blade…

“Oh, you wish.” Soft and sleepy and warm. She wriggled about, turning on her back to look up at him, trapped by the cage his limbs made around her. “Hi there.” God, that smile. Her eyes were sparkling, and she wrinkled her nose at him the way she always did when she was thoroughly happy about something and cupped his face in her warm hands, stroking his skin.

“My love,” he murmured. “My heart.” Her scent filled his head, beckoning, and he could hear the rush of her blood through her veins, the rapid beat of her heart. When they kissed he tasted toothpaste, and she wrapped herself around him –

Her arms tightened around his sides, and Bucky flinched, hissing into her mouth.

“You’re hurt.”

“Bruises,” he admitted, and brushed a kiss over her face, or tried to: she held him off.

“Let me see. Why didn’t you drink?”

What, from some random idiot in the nearest pub? Bucky pulled a face at her; the fact was, hunting was no _fun_ alone. “I wanted you,” he said, and this kiss was a rousing success. “I wanted your taste in my mouth, the beat of your blood, the sounds you make when I take you…”

Natasha shivered. “God, yes.” Her hands were tugging at his shirt, popping the buttons open, trailing over his chest. “I’ve missed your touch, your smell, it drives me crazy when I can’t smell you in our home.” She pushed at his shoulders, urging him up onto his knees, and Bucky pulled his shirt off and dropped it on the floor, kneeling over her, eyes on the long line of her throat, the perfect curves of her breasts. She’d put his dog tags on, his wedding band glinting in the lamplight where it hung from the chain, nestled between her gorgeous tits; neither of them wore their rings in the field. Natasha followed him up, her strong hands gentle on his bruised left side, the thin silky stuff of her nightdress a little maddening against his skin. Bucky groaned, and realised then that he was achingly hard for her, all tiredness wiped away. She was everything, the most important thing, and always would be. He tangled her thick hair around his fingers, pulling her head back to mouth at her throat, and the shiver that went through her when his teeth grazed over the scars of his own bite marks on her skin, the gasp she gave him, the clutch of her hands on his biceps, drove him wild, just wild.

“Tasha, sweetheart.”

“Strip,” she said, dropping her hands to his pants and pulling at his belt. “Strip off, soldier, I want you in me, I want –”

“Anything,” he said. “Everything.” She toppled him onto the mattress to work his jeans and underwear down his legs, and he yanked his socks off and threw them away, which was a battle, she was touching him so much, and then, then he caught her tight to him and rolled them over again, spread her out for him, pushed her knees apart with his, rucking the nightdress up around her hips.

“Ready?” He grinned at her, biting his lip. God, she was wet and hot and soft and open for him, fluttering around his fingers when he tucked two inside her, and she clenched around him deliberately, laughing.

“I think after seventy years I’m used to the size of your cock. Get up here.” Natasha dragged him up her body by the simple expedient of grabbing his ears and pulling, and Bucky went eagerly, laughing too, settling between her lovely thighs. “There. There. Oh my love.” She sighed out, raggedly, as he sank inside her, her head tipping back against the pillows, and then her fingers tightened imperiously in his hair. “Drink. Take me – _oh_. Oh, James.”

Her blood was thick and rich and hot in his mouth, and Bucky scrambled for the concentration he needed to fuck her and drink from her at the same time, his mind spinning, pleasure climbing in him as his side grew hot and the bruises began to heal, and god he was surrounded by her, surrendered to her, inside her and drinking from her and safe in the hot cradle of her body. Nothing would ever match this, no other joy would ever be this complete, no other pleasure this overwhelming; nothing, that was, but the heady helpless delight of her drinking from him. She was writhing underneath him, moaning, breathless, overcome, and when he’d had his fill and licked the red blood from her throat she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper.

“I love you. I love you.”

Bucky braced his hands on the mattress at either side of her shoulders, letting his knees slide further apart and settling in; their noses brushed, and he kissed that soft lush mouth, over and over, but that was too far apart; he slid his arms under her shoulders instead, his weight on his elbows, all their bodies pressed close, and yes, now, this, perfect. Natasha was moaning on every thrust, her eyes lidded, dazed with pleasure.

“You’re beautiful,” Bucky said hoarsely. “God, you’re so beautiful like this, outta your mind with it, mine, all mine. Don’t know how I go a day apart from you, Tasha, not a single day, want you with me always. You gonna come for me, love? Come for me, and then take me – drink –” He wasn’t going to last much longer; she was so hot and soft and gripped him so sweetly, trembling in his arms, her legs moving restlessly, so close, so close, and when he dropped his head to her throat again and set his teeth to her skin she cried out, a hot helpless little noise, ecstatic, and clenched all up around him so tight it drove him wild, and then – another few erratic thrusts –

He was floating somewhere near the ceiling as his body trembled, all white noise and sensation, only slowly recovering himself. She was kissing his face, still holding him tightly, and when he made to leave her Natasha bit his lip punishingly.

“Oh no you don’t. Three weeks apart, you stay where you are…”

“Ma’am,” Bucky murmured. “Agent Romanov, ma’am.” God, her tight wet heat around his sensitive cock was glorious. He shuddered with aftershocks when she rocked her hips up against him, and kissed her shoulder, her throat, over and over. Then, because even seventy years later it _still_ made him smug, he said, “Mrs Barnes,” grinning against her skin.

She rubbed her hands over his back, laughing softly, and when he kissed her again she whispered, “Welcome home,” against his lips.

“I love you,” he said. “God.” He laughed helplessly. “You’re amazing. How was Rome, by the way?”

“Boring without you,” Natasha said vaguely – a little evasive? “But the job is done and Nick has his toys, and you’re mine, all mine.” She walked her fingers down his spine, grinning.

“Forever.” He couldn’t let that go unsaid, ever, not once.

“Hmm.” Self-satisfied little purr. Bucky kissed the tip of her nose, and she dug her fingers into his ass, making him gasp, and yeah, round two was not far off, not far off at all. “Don’t I know it.”

“I would hope so… hey, what’s eating you, kid?”

“Well you, if you felt like it.”

“Tasha.”

She sighed, exasperated, giving in. “Coulson brought up the Initiative.”

Bucky grimaced. “That fucking ridiculous –”

“See, this is what makes me laugh,” she said. “Nick’s talking about essentially the exact job you did during the war.”

“Right, and if there were a war on, it would be the right job to do. Provided all the members had actual training and sense of discipline, which, let’s face it –”

“And that would be where you and I come in. You, particularly.”

That made him shake his head. “I’m not –”

“What?” Natasha caught his face in her hands, held his gaze steadily. “Not Steve?”

Bucky blinked. “Well, no.” That wasn’t the point, though.

“You’re a soldier,” she said. “You’re an NCO. Nick doesn’t need a figurehead. He needs someone who’ll take the candidates and hammer them into some sort of functioning team, and you can do that. You know you can.”

“Dammit,” Bucky said. He shifted his knees again and sat up on his heels, bringing her with him; she gasped sharply when his cock moved inside her, and rested her arms on his shoulders, her hair falling around their faces as she looked down at him. Red streaks on her throat and chest where her blood had spilt, dark and enticing against smooth skin that would never see a tan; he lapped at them, the salt of her sweat as lovely as the blood itself. Balanced in his lap, she squirmed against him, the nightdress rubbing over his skin, and he shut his eyes against the wet slick feeling of her, the knowledge that if he slid out of her now his own come would drip out of her and smear across his lap. He linked his hands underneath her ass, still for a moment, sighing. Then he looked up, frowning at her. “And then what? Where does that leave _us_? Exposed, out in the open –”

“Don’t you think I know that,” Natasha said. “Look, I – hell.” She shook her head. She was worried, he could see that a mile off, and he kissed the marks of his teeth on her throat, the soft underside of her jaw, her chin, her lovely mouth, until she sighed, relaxing a little.

“Tell me.”

“Nick’s going to push this whether we like it or not. I’m sure he is. He’s made up his mind, or had it made up for him; you know what the WSC are like. Sooner or later something will happen, and he will get his foot in the door. And when it does, it’s better if we’re in on the ground from the start.”

“Damage control?” Bucky said. That was Tasha for you: she thought in decades and long-term consequences, keeping all her options and paths of negotiation open until she was forced to take a stand. When she did, it was decisive, and usually the last word on the subject that anyone spoke.

“Yes,” she said simply.

Bucky sighed. Natasha cupped the back of his head in her hands, played with his hair while he closed his eyes and struggled with himself. Exposing themselves didn’t sit well with him; putting themselves under the authority – or at the mercy, rather – of SHIELD and its various oversight committees definitely didn’t. It had grown beyond their control, now: had been doing so since about five minutes after it had been founded, in truth, though neither Peggy nor Howard had ever been able to admit to that. And Nick was not Peggy. He would throw them to the wolves in a heartbeat, if he had to. (Not that Howard had been any better.) But Natasha was right, and Bucky knew it. Nick’s candidates were volatile nutjobs, on the whole; even Tony, poor kid. Let them loose without supervision and training and the chances of a disaster were high. And who better, after all, to handle the lot of them than two people who had helped to build SHIELD, who had been in the business for longer than Nick had been alive; two people who were, to all intents and purposes, super-soldiers, and who were unquestionably and unequivocally the most dangerous agents alive in the world?

Natasha kissed his forehead; he felt her smile against his skin. “Even Banner bleeds,” she said.

“How comforting.” Bucky tipped his head back to look up at her. “You want back in the game.”

“It’s been a long time,” she said. “I love you to death, but it’s nice to have something to _do_.”

“It is, isn’t it.”

“Is that a yes?” She bit her lip, smiling a little.

“It’s a probably.” He sighed again. “If I thought Nick could be trusted to leave it alone – but you’re right, he can’t.”

“We’ll be all right as long as he never realises our emergency overrides are built into the system,” she said brightly, and he started to laugh.

“He hasn’t so far.”

“Very true.” She was playing with his hair again, her face bright with triumph. “Thank you.”

“For letting you get your own way?” When didn’t he?

“For not being an unreasonable ass about it.” She rubbed her hands over his shoulders, smiling, and then slid them down his chest to tease his nipples, her thumbs rubbing in slow tight circles that sent hot pulses through him.

“I’ve just got home,” Bucky said, trying for grumpiness. “I’m in you. Not a great time to start a fight.”

Natasha rocked her hips, thoughtfully, making him shudder; Bucky leaned his head against her shoulder and filled his hands with her soft perfect ass, kneading her flesh, lifting her off his cock by an inch or so and letting her drop with an obscene, wet little noise. “So it isn’t.” He’d made her breathless already. Hah.

“No.” Then he leaned back, the hem of the nightdress in his hands, and tugged it up and over her head; she helped him wrestle it off and fling it away, laughing, her hair staticky as it fell back around her shoulders, naked for him at last, miles of smooth pale skin all his. “Hey,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her throat, her collarbones, the chain of his dog tags cold against his lips. “Can I have my wedding band back?”

She laughed, her breasts brushing his chest, and kissed his temple, the side of his face, her hips moving with more purpose now, circling, rocking back and forth, and hot delight was climbing back up his spine, his breath coming quick, desire tightening his skin. “You can have everything. Everything…”

“Gonna take it,” he promised, sliding his hands up her back to hold her to him. “Gonna keep it, always, everything, you and me...”

“Always, you’re mine, you feel so good in me, love, I can’t –”

“Yeah you can. Stay like this all night…”

“Oh god yeah.” Natasha twined her arms around his neck again, leaning in to kiss him endlessly, all eternity stretching ahead of them, together. Bucky closed his eyes and kissed her back and let his conscious mind go, unravel, unimportant. They would have to do _something_ about Nick, and the Initiative, but that was for later, much later. This was now: Natasha’s hot soft body and her quick biting kisses, the thrum of the blood in her veins and the beat of her heart, the ecstasy approaching, the joy of a love that had held them together for decades, and always would.


	3. Chapter 3

They were in London when the call came. It was a Friday night, and they had gone out to feed, the crowds thrumming like the lifeblood of the city itself, drunk and high and delighted with themselves. A touch, a kiss, a hand to wrist or elbow; sip by gentle sip they worked their way across the clubs, separating at the doors and then coming back together, teasing, tempting. Natasha loved to hunt like this: for the fun of it, for the excitement of the smell and the hot blood throbbing in her victims and the way the very air she breathed seemed laced with human needs and desires, calling to her, beckoning.

And for him. She could feel James’ eyes on her across every crowded dance floor, smell his hunger and his lust; she could hear him, even above the music, with his own victims, his confidence and charm. Natasha had been drunk on that man for more than half a century...

The last club was always the one they danced in. Once they had caught each other on the dance floor, once she was rubbing against him as the music pounded through them, once his hands were on her again, there was only one thing on either of their minds. His hands on her hips, sliding downwards and in, her ass rocking against his growing erection, the smell of fresh blood on his breath as he kissed the side of her face, her jaw, her neck and shoulder, burying his face in the thin scarf she wore to hide the marks of his teeth that so rarely had time to heal. What he did to her, what he’d always done to her… she was a little high on the intoxicants in the blood she’d taken tonight, and every whispered word, every rush of power, every hot touch had only made her want him more. Natasha tangled the fingers of her left hand with his, nudging him closer to her aching cunt; the seam of her jeans would rub just right against her if he only put his fingers on her, and he laughed in her ear when she reached up with her other hand to pull her hair over her shoulder, untie her scarf, exposing her throat.

“Hel- _lo_.” Press of bodies all around them, the whole crowd swaying to the same rhythm, pounding music, enveloping darkness. James dragged his free hand up her body to rest on her chest, holding her to him, his wrist nestled between her breasts, his fingers at her collarbones. Natasha reached back and dug her own fingers into the meat of his thigh just underneath his ass as they moved together.

“Wanted you all night,” she said dreamily; no human could hear it over this music. “Every touch, every feed, every man who looked at me, I thought of you… there was a grabby one in Soho; I took more from him than the others, and left him with the pain… imagined your hands on his throat, watching you drink him dry for touching me.”

“Every time I feel you look at me it drives me crazy,” he said, his voice as crooning as hers. “Every feed just makes me miss you, your taste, your smell; every time some stranger touches me I _ache_ for you. Get on my knees for you and do what you want right out here in public…”

She turned her head, raised her face to kiss the line of his jaw, the soft skin underneath. “Then drink.”

Shuddering, he laughed, his teeth flashing in the flickering lights. The lovely reflective gleam of his eyes caught and captivated her. He dropped his head and pressed his fingers against her cunt, rubbing sweet circles over her clit, too much, too much; she felt the gentle scrape of his teeth on her neck before he bit down, and pain and pleasure and the sweet familiar pulse of him feeding from her rushed through her body. She gasped, her head falling back, trembling, laughing, held up by his strength, staring unseeing at the lights and cables above their heads in the high ceiling, her body throbbing with bliss, tensing, tightening, spiralling into desperation, strung out tight as wire between his fingers on her cunt and his mouth on her throat, until finally the wire snapped and the world spun away, her hands closing convulsively over his, as he made her come right there on the dance floor in a crowd of drunken revellers who never noticed a thing.

Dizzy with joy she dragged him into the back; where, the toilets were full, the lights here brighter, the music softer, people talking and laughing and staggering about drunkenly; outside, past the smokers around the door, stumbling into a nicely darkened doorway, where he picked her up by the hips and pressed her against the wall and kissed her till she was moaning again, writhing, as ready as he.

“Taxi,” James said, panting into her mouth. “ _Home_.”

Natasha laughed at him. “You just got me off on a dance floor packed with people and you’re worried about privacy?” She caught a handful of his thick hair and pulled his head back to brush her lips over his throat, sighing theatrically. “Now don’t drop me, darling…”

God above, how did he still taste so _good_ after all these years. He pressed her closer to the wall as she drank from him, choking off his cries, his body trembling. Her hands fumbled with his pants, unbuttoning them and pushing them out of the way so she could wrap the scarf around his cock and stroke him. Outside the mouth of the alley partygoers staggered past, and taxis rumbled down the streets all around them, and Natasha filled her mouth with his hot blood, trembling with the rush it gave her, and played with his cock and licked him delicately clean when he shuddered in her arms, eyes closed, mouth slack with pleasure. James didn’t drop her; he never had.

“God,” he said at last, chest heaving, and kissed her deeply. “I love you.”

“Mmmm. I love you. And our Friday nights.”

Breathless laugh. “If you’d told me then…”

“Me either.” She tied the soiled scarf into a tight bundle and tucked him gently back into his pants while he nuzzled at her neck, ran his lips over his marks on her. His hot hands were on her ass; Natasha arched against his body, sighing, her eyes half-closed, turning her face up to be kissed.

“Home,” James said again. “Stay in bed till next Friday.” They’d done that before; for their fiftieth anniversary, in point of fact. Natasha still couldn’t think of that week without going a little weak in the knees. From the way he was grinning, neither could he.

She was throwing the scarf in the nearest bin, and James had stepped off the kerb to hail a taxi, when his phone started buzzing. Natasha gave the driver their address while he answered it.

“Yeah. You – when? Yes.” Silence; then, rather angrily, “Is that necessary? It’s been seventy years, give the man a – _what_.”

“James?” Natasha reached out to touch his face, his shoulder; he turned to her slow and stiff as the old man he would never be, his face so pale it frightened her.

“It’s Nick,” he said, letting his hand fall to his lap, the phone screen throwing a ghostly glow onto the roof of the cab. “It – they found the Valkyrie. The new sonar…” He swallowed hard. “Tasha, Steve’s _alive_.”

+++

It was very bright, wherever he was. Something soft underneath him, woolly and warm under his fingers and arms; a blanket? Steve stirred, slowly, opened his eyes. Blank expanse of white, smooth and unbroken. Snow; cold; death coming up to swallow him… It took a moment before the word _ceiling_ formed in his mind.

“Hey,” a voice said nearby; a warm deep voice he knew, or thought he knew. There was a burr in it he didn’t recognise, something… resonant and velvety. “Steve?”

He turned his head on the pillow. Every muscle in his body ached, and he felt as weak as a new-born kitten. Bucky was sitting by his bedside in a high-backed chair, his long legs flung out in front of him, in his shirtsleeves, his hair all tousled, like he’d slept there all night; he held a glass of water in his hand, as if he’d just picked it off the table to drink when Steve opened his eyes.

It was so perfectly normal for Bucky to be there when he woke up in hospitals that several seconds passed before Steve remembered the train at all.

“You’re dead,” he croaked, his throat sore with disuse.

Bucky broke into a grin. “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said; but he held Steve’s head off the pillow and the glass to his lips so he could sip, slowly, and he sat down on the edge of Steve’s bed when Steve tried and mostly failed to push himself upright, the line of his thigh warm and comforting against Steve’s side. “Easy. You’ll be all right.”

“But the train.” Steve caught his wrist and hung on tight as he could – even that movement was agony. He was a mess. How long had it been? He needed blood, now, at once. How was Bucky even here? Skin, bones, blood rushing though veins under Steve’s fingertips; the mattress dipping under his weight and the press of his thigh. He was solid, all right. And he smelled the same as ever: something tangy and warm and comforting that Steve wanted to bury his face in and breathe forever. It calmed him: it was Bucky, it really was. Something mad and impossible had happened to both of them, but it was Bucky.

Bucky said, “I fell, you didn’t dream that.”

“Then –”

“This pretty redhead,” said Bucky, grinning again.

“Of _course_ there’s a girl,” said Steve, resigned and amused in equal measures, and jumped when a woman started laughing. The girl in question was in the room with them, it turned out, on his other side, which was why he hadn’t noticed her. She had hair red as blood and tied into a haphazard knot at the back of her head; she was dressed very oddly, in indecently tight trousers and a leather jacket like a pilot’s, not very tall, and when she moved closer to the bed something in her posture and gait belied the slenderness of her body; there was more strength there than you’d think. She was an agent? A soldier? What the hell was going on here?

“Hi,” she said; nondescript US accent, warm husky voice. It had the same oddly resonant quality as Bucky’s. Was there something wrong with his ears? “I’m Natasha.”

“Ma’am,” Steve said politely. “Buck, what’s – what’s going on?” How long had he been in the hospital, and how soon could he get out, that was the question. If he couldn’t even hold his head up without help, it had been a long time, and he needed – even Howard and Peggy didn’t know what the serum had done to him. Erskine had said the likelihood was negligible. Steve had only ever admitted it to Philips, who alone had already been aware of the base component of the serum. It was stupid to be angry when Steve had known the risk and agreed to it anyway, but the dependency made him ashamed; any dependency always had. And now he couldn’t even hunt for himself, and would probably die unless he told someone the truth... Panic began to twist in his gut. Thank god it was Bucky, and not – but the girl, she didn’t need to know. He worked moisture into his mouth, casting around for a way to ask her to leave without being rude. Part of him wanted to catch her by the throat, shove her out of the room and lock the door behind her, but she obviously meant something to Bucky, if she was here. Something like possessiveness twisted in his gut, and that was so utterly ridiculous and inappropriate that he nearly laughed at himself, glancing between them.

“It’s not gonna be easy, Steve, I –” Bucky broke off, sharply. Suddenly his hand flashed out and caught Steve’s face; gently, he turned Steve’s head towards the light – Steve – cursing himself silently – squeezed his eyes shut to hide that tell-tale gleam, and tried to pull away –

“My god,” Natasha said quietly. She understood? Steve’s breath caught in his throat.

“You idiot,” Bucky said, just as soft. “How long? The serum?”

Blankly, Steve said, “The chances were about two million to one.” How did Bucky know? He didn’t seem disgusted, at least… but then, nothing Steve could ever do would push Bucky away, any more than the other way around. That, in this case, was kind of the problem.

“Magic’s not _predictable_ ,” said Bucky. He was unbuckling his wristwatch; laid it on the table, and began to push his sleeve up to his elbow. “It isn’t science, what we are.”

Nausea made Steve dizzy. “We…? No, no I won’t. Buck –”

But Bucky laughed softly. “It’s been seventy years, Steve… I didn’t survive that fall because there was a feather bed at the end of it.” There were scars on Bucky’s wrist, raised and white against his skin, the marks of teeth that had bitten him again and again; Steve crawled up the bed trying to get away from the implications. That was exactly what he didn’t want, what he’d never wanted, the fear that made his stomach churn when he pictured telling Bucky what he was. Natasha’s hands, astonishingly strong, held him in place.

“Let me, then,” she said, so close her scent filled his head up, musky and pleasantly cloying, like a hot bath you’d poured a scent of roses into, inescapable. Her blood was – she dropped a puddle of bangles into his lap – her wrist was scarred too – Steve’s hands came up; he meant to push her away, but he couldn’t, too weak, too hungry. His hands were shaking. He had a hold of her arm; he could see the blood pumping through the veins in her wrist, could hear her heartbeat, her breathing. She was wearing a wedding band, an engagement ring. Bucky’s? She turned her wrist up, holding it out to Bucky, and he bent his head over her hand and Jesus fucking Christ. If Steve were healthy enough to have gotten hard right there he would have. The sweet little noise of her skin tearing; the smell of her blood overwhelming; Bucky’s red mouth on her… Steve was shaking, and when Bucky moved back and he saw the dark trickle of blood on her skin he groaned.

“There,” said Natasha, and god she tasted sweeter and richer and better than any human he’d ever fed from, anyone at all. “There.” Bucky’s hand was in his hair, petting him, and she laughed softly. “Drink, dear heart; you’re mine now…” The words had some secret significance, because they made Bucky laugh as well, and when Steve had taken enough from her he was too blood-drunk to turn him away a second time. Bucky’s blood in his mouth was tangy and hot and irresistible, his face flushed, his eyes bright, head tilted back as Steve drank from him. Steve had never seen him look like that; never.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Natasha said, her hand on Steve’s shoulder; she rubbed her thumb over his neck, over the pulsing artery. “You know how good it feels… or do you? Has no one ever drunk from you, pet? Good. I so hate being made to share.” The world was spinning, impossibly brighter than before; he could feel every inch of his skin, hear footsteps all through the building, the cars outside, her heartbeat and Bucky’s, the breathing of the people passing outside the room. When Steve dropped Bucky’s wrist and fell back against the pillows he was panting, dizzy; it was like the oxygen high he’d had when he came out of the chamber for the first time in this new and supposedly improved body, and now, with their blood in him, steadying his shaking limbs and making him throb with restored health, he was more than capable of being turned on when Bucky took Natasha’s bloodstained wrist in his hands and licked it clean.

Steve stared up at the ceiling in silence for what felt like hours. Then, very slowly, he said, “Seventy years.”

“Yes,” said Bucky, without apologising or sugar-coating.

“Yes.” Steve shuddered. “I’m going to need more very soon.” He forced the words out, clinical.

Natasha laughed that husky laugh again. “We’re here. It’ll be fine.”

Steve looked at her. She was flushed and smiling and warm, the kind of girl Howard would describe as _a sweet little armful_ , but there was only one explanation for Bucky’s survival. “You made him this,” he said.

“Apparently I make a very charming corpse,” Bucky said, straight-faced.

She pursed her lips and reached across Steve’s prone form to give him a little shove off the bed. “Would you go and get me some coffee? Make sure you take a while.”

Steve didn’t think he’d ever seen this look on Bucky’s face before either: this sharp, knowing look that made him seem… old. His friend was still there, in his smile and his sarcasm and his caring for Steve, but there was someone very old and very clever and very wise there too. It unsettled him.

“Of course,” Bucky said, and took her hand again and kissed it, casually affectionate, casually possessive. Then he turned that still, knowing look on Steve, who tried hard not to let his discomfort show. Bucky strapped his wristwatch back on and smoothed Steve’s hair with a practiced gesture. “Try not to make _too_ bad an impression, would ya?”

“Knowing you the damage was done five minutes after you met,” said Steve on automatic, and Bucky was laughing when he left the room.

Silence. He shifted about under the covers; the ache in his muscles was gone, and he could sit up unaided. Some sort of hospital room, very bare and very simple; the blinds over the windows to the corridors were closed, and Steve strongly suspected that the place had been cleared of anything too future-y, because apart from being private it didn’t look too different to what he’d expect. Seventy years. What did the world look like, now? Where was Peggy, and was she OK? He had a thousand questions, none of which would form properly on his tongue. Natasha was perched on the edge of the bed by his hips and swinging her foot in circles, smiling at him, waiting for the words to come.

In the end Steve picked the simplest. “How?” he said.

“The Soviets had a programme they called the red rooms,” Natasha said. “The idea, initially, was to create loyal agents; the perfect soldiers, in a sense. Raise them from childhood to know nothing else. At some point during the war, or shortly before, the KGB discovered Erskine’s, or – more likely – Zola’s research, and expanded the programme… but the trick kills children, did you know? Their bodies won’t accept the virus. So if they wanted super-soldiers, they needed adults.”

Steve felt sick all over again. “And you…”

“I was a soldier. They took their pick from the hospitals, especially those who’d already had specific training, rather than risk the agents they already had.”

“You – found Bucky? After he fell.”

“I did.”

“And you did _this_ to him.”

Now she laughed, throwing her head back; Steve reached out suddenly and caught a fold of her scarf between finger and thumb, pulling it down. It seemed to be a single continuous loop of fabric, so it didn’t fall into her lap, but he saw the bite marks on her throat, pink and healing, before her hand flashed up and gripped his wrist with unnatural strength. When she realised what he was looking at she gentled her touch.

“He was the first living thing I’d seen for days,” she said. “He was the first human I’d seen for months who did not want to strip the skin off my bones and dissect me mind and body, use me for a tool… He asked me to kill him before he fell into Zola’s hands again. I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t leave him…” Steve was trembling. She put her other hand against his cheek, rubbed her thumb along his cheekbone. “Trust me, Steve. Please? You love him; I love him.” She smiled.

“The bite marks…”

“Oh.” Natasha glanced away, the light reflecting in her eyes, a little smile curving her mouth. “No one ever has fed from you, have they?”

“There’s only me,” said Steve. “And Schmidt.”

“There are more of us than that, thanks to Karpov. Put it like this, dearest. It’s… intimate.”

And now Steve was blushing. “You mean…”

“I mean it feels very, very good.”

Well. Some of the – people he’d fed from – had seemed to like it, but later on most of them had been Nazi soldiers and Steve had not really cared what they felt, or how they died. He knew his saliva could heal minor wounds, and he knew his voice and touch could hypnotise and entrance others, if he wanted it to. He’d never thought about – about feeding and sex. He sure as hell was now, though, and he had to look away from her – the long smooth throat – the taste of her blood – her scent and her warmth – god, he was messed up.

“Peggy?” he asked quietly.

Natasha’s voice was very gentle now. “We haven’t seen her in a while. She has dementia, and she said she didn’t want us to visit anymore.”

God, his head hurt. Dementia. Seventy years. Half an hour ago he’d been crashing a plane. _The Stork Club… don’t you dare be late_. Half an hour ago he’d been dead. Steve squeezed his eyes shut, his hands clenched into fists in his lap, and for several seconds he neither moved nor spoke. At last Natasha’s warm hands wrapped around his.

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “Not yet, not tomorrow, not next month… But it’ll be all right, one day, and we’ll be there, James and I.”

“You call him _James_?”

“Bucky means idiot in Russian,” she said promptly.

Steve gave her a doubtful look. Natasha grinned at him. After a second, rather in spite of himself, he actually laughed a little.

“Seventy years,” he said. And then, shaking all over, as if that laugh had cracked his armour and now the rest of him was falling apart at last, he said, “I had a _date_ ,” and was intensely grateful to her when she looked away.

+++

Steve was dozing by the time they reached the house, so he only vaguely registered hedges, and overhanging trees, and the crunch of gravel under the car tyres. He stumbled out of the back seat, yawning and stretching; it was near dawn, the coldest part of the night, faint grey light growing around them, and the breeze smelt of grass and forest and flowers. Overhead the stars were fading, serene and lovely. Seventy years was nothing to them… and perhaps, in a century or so, it would be nothing to Steve himself. He shivered a bit, rubbing at his face, and finally focussed on his more immediate surroundings: gravel drive, an untidy lawn, trees. Steve made a slow one-eighty turn, wondering how far the garden went – was it, rather, a park?

The house was a mansion. There was no other word for it. For a few seconds he stared up at it, perplexed; no, definitely, at least three stories, huge windows, a portico, ivy climbing the walls, a riot of flowerbeds along the walls –

“What the actual fuck,” he said, blankly.

“Welcome home,” said Bucky, sounding hugely amused.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Steve said again, with rather more feeling. “Who the fuck are you and what have you done with Bucky Barnes?”

“I like it,” said Bucky, in that blandly cheerful voice he’d been using to rile Steve up since they were four.

“Who do you think you _are_ , Little Lord Fauntleroy?”

From inside the porch Natasha started laughing, and Steve remembered with a start that it was her home too: that she’d spent the last seventy years married to Bucky and maybe he shouldn’t be acting like an asshole when she was good enough to welcome him in like a stray dog after all this time, and without ever having met him before, too.

“Uh,” he said.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” she said, coming back out; she’d put the lights on in the hall and the room to the left of the front door, so that the terrace at the side of the house and half the drive were lit up. “Anniversary present.”

“It’s just,” said Steve, helplessly, and got no further. It was a fucking – it was a mansion, for god’s sake. His grandmother had lived in a place like this until she married: as a servant. It was all right for Monty to own ‘em, but for Bucky to live in a house like this…

“We hid here,” said Bucky. “Trying to get back to London.” He leaned against the side of the car, smiling properly now. “Seemed as good a place to put down roots as any.”

“…right,” said Steve, still awkward. As good a place as any, his ass. Whatever had happened here had been important to them, that was obvious. Could you be even more of an asshole, Rogers? Sure, if you tried. He put his hands in his pockets, wrong-footed with his best friend for the first time in twenty-four years. Well, or ninety. For Bucky, it was ninety. And there was Natasha.

She was smiling at him, a little fond, a little welcoming. Short and slender and probably more dangerous than Steve himself, and very lovely, and kind. She said she’d saved Bucky for selfishness, all those years ago, but Steve doubted that. She’d hated seeing someone in pain, he guessed.

“Come on in,” she said now. “I’ll show you round… there’s a couple rooms we don’t use much.” She grinned. “Make yourself at home…”

Inside the hallway it smelt of polished wood and books and Natasha and Bucky’s bodies, the suggestion of their blood. The study was on the left off the hall, the sitting room – big enough to have been a ballroom once, to Steve’s eyes – to the right. The staircase loomed up right in front of them, a beautiful sweep of dark, shining wood. Steve didn’t exactly have an eye for furniture or decorations or anything, but everything from the table in the hallway to the glimpse he got of the couches in the living room seemed solid and familiar. When she showed him the study – or the library, given the bookshelves – and he saw the computers on the desk it gave him a jolt. They looked incongruous, out of place. The 21st century had not gained much traction in this house.

Well, maybe in the kitchen. There was a big old table and a range that looked vaguely like what he’d expect, but the kettle apparently ran on electricity, and there was a toaster, and one of those things, a microwave oven, and a fancy-looking coffee machine, aaaaand a refrigerator.

“I can’t work out,” Steve said suddenly, “how much of this is normal for now and how much means you’re really really rich.”

Natasha said, “You want a coffee?”

“I – that’d be great.” He watched her curiously as she hit the on button on the machine, and opened cupboards: mugs, teaspoons, sugar.

“There’s no milk. Oh wait.” She’d found a square cardboard packet in a cupboard that said UHT. “This is the long-life stuff.”

“I’ll drink it any way,” said Steve. “Thank you.”

“All right then.” She leaned her hip against the counter. She had a funny trick – Steve thought he liked it – of not really showing her expression but managing to get across what she was feeling quite well, and he thought she was feeling fond, just now. Talking to her was – odd. She knew so much about him, and he so little about her. “We’re not really _really_ rich,” she said, over the angry whirr of grinding coffee beans.

He blinked, disbelieving.

“We are more than comfortable.” Now she grinned, openly. “The money sort of piles up when you don’t need to think about retiring or anything. And I charge extortionately for my services. Our services.”

“Freelancing.” Steve wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It seemed so… and yet, to only do what you wanted to do, what you _knew_ was right and needed doing…

“There’s a story there, and you need to hear it, but not today.”  

“Bucky hasn’t changed so much that I can’t tell when he distrusts someone, and he _really_ distrusts Fury.”

“Nick’s doing his best,” said Natasha. “It’s just that his best is… not necessarily in _our_ best interests.” She tilted her head, studying him. “What we are… it makes us a resource, first and foremost. A weapon.”

“I know that.” Steve narrowed his eyes at her. She handed him a mug of coffee without blinking, and he tipped sugar into it and stirred, loving the smell.

“This is a much more complicated war than the one you signed up to fight, Steve. There aren’t any – or very few – common enemies anymore. Sometimes our own side is the one that’s doing the most damage.”

“I’m not under any illusions that we’ve ever been exactly saintly. Very few of the higher-ups were happy with Erskine’s insistence on _volunteers_ for Project Rebirth.”

“I’m not accusing you of being naïve,” Natasha said. “I just need you to be careful. Don’t make any decisions without being comprehensively informed.”

Suddenly he smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I – thank you. For worrying.” For everything. She smiled back at him, and Steve thought, once again, that he liked her very much indeed.

+++

The books were the best, or possibly the most confusing, thing. Writers he loved had vanished without a trace; writers he hated had won the Nobel; and every other room in the house was lined with bookshelves. Not all of them were in English, and Steve ran his finger along the spines of Russian or German or French titles curiously, wondering if they were Bucky’s as well as Natasha’s, how many languages he spoke now, whether his taste in books was the same.

_Make yourself at home. Read whatever you want_. Steve stopped in front of a shelf of English books, closed his eyes, and reached out. His fingers found a slim paperback: Italo Calvino… why not. It looked fun. They’d given him a guest room on the first floor, down the corridor from their own bedroom, a wide bright space with big windows and a comfortable bed, very plain otherwise. Natasha hadn’t been kidding when she’d said they didn’t use all the rooms. Steve looked round: white walls, wooden floor, long dark blue drapes. Everything he owned in the world fitted into a single bag, these days. And it had been Bucky who’d gone out and bought him all of it, things to wear that wouldn’t attract attention, ordinary clothes, uncomfortable at first, but Steve had grown used to them quickly.

Laughter in the corridor, quiet and soft. He crossed the room to the door and poked his head out to say goodnight: Natasha barefoot, her hand in Bucky’s as he followed her up the stairs, smiling. On the landing he gave her hand a tug, and she came to him and slid her arms around his waist, her body leaning against his. Bucky’s hand in her hair was tangling her curls.

“It’ll be all right,” she said.

“Famous last words,” said Bucky. “What about that damned Initiative?”

“You and I,” Natasha started, and Bucky laughed.

“He’ll go if we go.”

“And you’ll go if he does, and I’ll have to follow you.” She heaved a sigh, in mock disgust. Then she said, “He needs peace and quiet and safety, not to be shoved back onto the front lines…”

“The way we were?”

“Well, yes.”

Bucky laughed again, that soft slow laugh, and kissed her temple. “It’ll be all right,” he said; with such soft conviction that Steve almost believed it himself. _All right_ , after seventy years, and Peggy lost to him, and Howard and the Commandos dead…

A week ago, Bucky had been dead. Was there some sort of cosmic trade-off? Did he get one but not the other? Steve shuddered at the thought. But what use whining? He glanced around the room again, the bare spacious room with its big windows and its polished floor. _Make yourself at home_. He didn’t see how he ever could. The war was over and the world had changed, and Steve was left stranded in a bare guest bedroom with a skillset he no longer knew how to put to good use, an encyclopaedic knowledge of irrelevant baseball games, and an unfortunate need to drink human blood to stay alive which he didn’t have the slightest clue how to manage when not on a battlefield. He’d be dead already if it weren’t for Bucky; dead, or gone feral with the bloodlust and responsible for slaughtering someone.

Seventy years later: still the charity case friend… _I can get by on my own. The point is, you don’t have to._ _Make yourself at home_. How could he not? What else could he do, but carry on? And Bucky kept smiling at him, every time Steve caught his eye. He wasn’t alone; he’d never been truly alone.

“Hey.” Bucky, rapping on the frame of Steve’s bedroom door. “All OK?”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “Just, you know.”

“I do.” There was that look again, so much older than Bucky had any right to seem, not when his face and body were exactly the same as Steve remembered them: eternally frozen at twenty-eight.

“Hey,” said Steve.

“Hmm?” Bucky’s eyebrows climbed.

“I’m still not shining your shoes.”

Bucky broke into a grin. “Don’t worry about it. Natasha’ll find you something to do.”

“I like her,” said Steve.

“Yeah,” said Bucky. “I always knew you would.”

They smiled at each other.

“Here,” Bucky said. “Try and sleep, OK? We’re here. You’re not alone.”

“I know,” said Steve, and sighed. “I know. Hey –”

“Steve. If you try and thank me I’ll turn you out of the house.”

Steve laughed. “Good night,” he said instead.

“Sleep well.” Bucky left him, smiling, and Steve put his hands in his pockets and sighed. Sleep well. Probably not, let’s be honest. At least not tonight. But someday, probably.

“Sketchbook,” he said to the empty room. “Sketchbook, pencils.” Maybe a table by that window there to draw at. And tomorrow morning he could go for a run in that park, and make fun of Bucky for owning it when he got back – if indeed he did own it – and at some point he would get Natasha to sit down with him and tell him everything about SHIELD, good and bad, and explain whatever the Initiative was.

Everything he knew had fallen away and vanished, but the world was still turning, and the food was a lot better these days, and Bucky was alive. That was very far from nothing.

“I hope they still have Twinkies,” he said suddenly, and laughed at himself for even thinking of it.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

“You’re going to a what,” said Steve.

“He’s being flippant,” said Natasha. “It’s good for us to keep in touch, that’s all.”

“Like I said,” said Bucky. “Vampire convention.”

Steve and Natasha looked at each other. Bucky got an indescribable kick out of those identical expressions. He probably ought to be ashamed of himself.

“There’s also you,” he said to Steve without thinking, wholly under the spell of those looks, and promptly regretted it.

“What about me?” Steve looked surprised.

“They need to know who you are,” Bucky said, searching for the right words to explain to Steve that he and Natasha were going to spend a weekend in a nicely secluded house in the middle of nowhere with a score or more of immortal former KGB officers and sundry other assholes who considered it their right to saw Steve’s head off and stick it on a pike if he broke any of their arbitrary rules for living as a vampire, and that they considered it their right because Bucky had sold his soul to Peggy Carter and promised them it _was_ their right, more than half a century ago.

Natasha was watching him, frowning a little. She didn’t see the problem, he realised with a start; she didn’t know Steve well enough, yet, to understand how he would react…

Steve’s face had taken on a thunderous expression to match the clouds that had been gathering all the hot summer afternoon; Bucky didn’t need him to take his sunglasses off to know the way his eyes were narrowed.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “Nobody’s ever known, and I –”

“You don’t get a choice,” Bucky said bluntly. “It’s not as easy to hide it as it was then, not from people who know what to look for.” It was no good beating around the bush with Steve. It never had been. You had to tell him unpleasant truths straight out, and even then he had a tendency to refuse to hear them. _Not a back alley, but a war…_

Steve hadn’t changed. Sometimes Bucky forgot that. It made him feel like a terrible friend. It made him anxious, too, in a diffuse, undefined way that mingled fear for Steve with fear of… well, he wasn’t even sure himself. It was probably one of those dratted premonitions. That just made him more twitchy. 

“We’re protecting you, Steve,” Natasha said, more gently. “The others need to have the facts of this.” She waved her hand, a gesture encompassing the patio, the table strewn with the morning newspaper, books, empty water glasses, the three of them, together.

Steve’s jaw was still clenched. “If it gets out –”

Bucky shook his head. “It’s not going to get out. Half the reason we have a vampire convention in the first place is to make sure everyone’s keeping schtum about… basically everything.”

“I don’t see why they need to know.” He was mulish now, and that sent Bucky straight into a temper, same as always, just as if they were both still thirteen.

“Because –”

“Because it prevents misunderstandings and makes sure nobody has any unfortunate knee-jerk reactions to finding out about you,” Natasha interrupted. “You have to understand, Steve, there are maybe sixty or seventy of us, and we don’t…” She waved a hand. “Proliferate. We know each other. They need to know who you are, too.”

Steve was still frowning, looking back and forth between Bucky and Natasha. He knew perfectly well what Bucky looked like in a temper, of course. God, it had been years – decades – since he’d been so close to letting rip with someone. That didn’t help, either.

“You need to trust us, with this,” Bucky said. “You need to trust me.”

The most important thing was squaring Steve’s presence – his very existence – with the others. He didn’t quite know what odd foreboding was holding him back from explaining more fully to Steve, but Bucky had learned not to ignore that anxiousness. If nothing else he could see a ferocious argument coming, and he didn’t want to get caught up in that before he knew Steve would be safe from the others.

After a few moments, Steve said, “I do. I just don’t think I understand.”

“Let us just get the basics settled,” said Bucky, in his I’m-your-NCO-this-is-my-job voice, “and then we’ll go over it.”

Some part of Steve still responded to that voice. He nodded, and said something forced about when they were leaving, and the conversation moved on.

+++

Natasha didn’t approve and didn’t understand. For the first time in seventy years Bucky set himself to avoiding a conversation with her, and only those same seventy years of marriage let him know how upset she was about it. No one else would have guessed, from the way she acted.

That made him feel even more of an asshole. But that strange foreboding was still churning up his guts, a sense of something coming that bordered on the psychic… god, he hated it when this happened. You got all screwed up and worried about something that you weren’t even sure would happen, and half the time it didn’t happen. (Probably Natasha’s own experience with these stupid presentiments was all that was keeping her from strapping him to the bedstead and making him talk.)

He tried, over and over, to put it into words: _he’ll break it. He’ll go in there all self-righteous Captain America… He won’t understand_. Forcing the deal on both SHIELD and their – their community had been one of the hardest things Bucky had ever done: the price of it had never entirely sat right with him, and never would. But he had put those scruples aside and done the job that needed doing in order to keep the peace. Why shouldn’t Natasha expect the same of Steve?

What people tended to forget about Steve was that he didn’t know how to, and rarely approved of, compromise. He saw the world in blocks of colour: black, white, either, or. He was (when he chose to be) such a damn good soldier because the _thinking_ suited him, rather than the life; the attitudes required for it were the cornerstones of everything that made up Steve Rogers. He would do whatever it took to get the job done, and put that job before any personal considerations, but he didn’t love peace for the sake of peace. He would probably never again be as happy as he had been during the Second World War. For the Allies, it had had the dubious distinction of being an unambiguously just war, a war where Steve had known unequivocally and unquestionably which side was the right one to be on. That was the kind of framework Steve flourished in.

It was also a framework which had disappeared almost entirely from the world.

+++

They drove up to the gathering in a silence that bordered on stony. Natasha was too proud to nag, though occasionally Bucky saw her knuckles whiten when she gripped the steering wheel more tightly, and Bucky still didn't really have the words. But when they arrived there was no question of not presenting a united front.

“I wasn’t expecting your call,” said Yelena. She was inventorying their weapons in the entrance hall, and managed to make the veiled question sound both cheerful and inconsequential.

“We missed everyone,” said Bucky blandly.

Yelena looked at him.

“Especially you,” he added, before Natasha could stop him. In the ordinary way of things, he enjoyed tweaking these people’s noses much too much. There were a few here he honestly liked – Shostakov; Dot – but for the most part, he was tolerated because he was Natasha’s husband, and that was it. They resented the role he’d played in the deal, and they resented his involvement with SHIELD, and sometimes Bucky thought that many of the older ones, those who’d been given the trick by Department X early in the war, resented anyone who had come by the trick in a less, well, torturous manner, just on principle.

They severely overestimated the advantages of Hydra prison camps and falling from trains, in Bucky’s considered opinion. Usually it pissed him off just enough that he got a lot of fun out of being annoying, but this year – what with everything else that was going on: Steve alive; Nick trying to put this team together...

Anyway. In the ordinary way of things, Natasha thought it was funny.

Yelena’s expression didn’t change. She merely turned her gaze on Natasha.  

“It’s been much too long,” Natasha said merrily.

“Yes,” said Yelena. “It certainly has.”

+++

Dinner was served an hour or so after their arrival, when the evening light was turning golden on the lawns and terrace and a cheerful breeze had made itself known through the open windows of their suite. Still, the long dining room was dim, lit with candles that made the place warm and shone on the dark wood panelling, glittered on crystal decanters, rows of cutlery, glowed golden on the skin of their servers, gleamed reflectively in the diners’ inhuman eyes.

The food was delicious, the conversation quiet; Bucky spent most of the meal smiling at his wife opposite him, watching the candlelight in her hair, the long line of her lovely neck, lost in thought. Looking at her was one of his favourite pastimes under whatever circumstances. He needed to explain, to put things right with her… At one point Sokolov put his wine glass down and wrapped his fingers around the arm of the girl serving him, his eyes gleaming. She turned her wrist up to him, biting her lip in anticipation, and Bucky looked away. They were well-paid, the servers; they would remember very little of what went on here this weekend, and they were never badly injured, but he still found it disturbing, all these years later.

Natasha caught his eye; he winked at her. Anyone else might have said her expression didn’t change, but he caught the upturn of her lush mouth, the softening around her eyes. She didn’t like it much either.

It was Yelena’s turn to host this year, so when the food was cleared away and the conversation had faded, the coffee served and the last of the wine poured, she stood up gracefully and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“We’re fewer than last year,” she said without preamble. “Several sent their apologies; others I couldn’t reach. On the other hand, it’s been seven years since Natasha and Bucky were last here.”

Little ripple of laughter. Bucky said, “We’ve been busy,” with aplomb.

“With each other,” said Dot, “don’t you get bored?”

“No,” said Bucky.

Natasha propped her chin on her hand, her bangles clattering, and sighed girlishly. “Oh do go on.”

Laughter again; Bucky blew her a kiss. “This place is lovely, Yelena; thank you,” he said.

Yelena smiled, and almost meant it. “Glad to hear it.” It had been a decade and a half already, but the memory of Strucker’s turn always made everyone shudder. A community chiefly made up of immortal KGB officers who’d lived through the Second World War was best _not_ invited to questionable ancestral castles just outside of Munich, Bucky felt.

“So to business,” Yelena went on. “ _Is_ there any?”

Laughter again.

“None,” said Tatiana.

“Possibly,” said Shostakov. “Strucker –”

The whole room groaned in chorus.

“I know,” Shostakov said. “I know, I _know_. But he keeps pushing and pushing.”

“He’s a Nazi, what do you expect,” said Ksenia.

“Has he drained anyone; has he passed on the trick,” said Yelena. “Has he killed another one of us. If that’s three ‘no’s, our hands are tied.”

“If he continues to do business with organisations like the Ten Rings I doubt it’ll be long before it’s three ‘yes’-es.” Shostakov glared.

“If he crosses the line SHIELD will be the first to know,” said Natasha. “And then James and I will be the second, and consequently this gathering the third, and we will deal with it then.”

Shostakov nodded sharply, but you could tell he didn’t like it. Hell, none of them liked it, not truly. Putting up with Strucker was part of the price of the deal, but Bucky was not the only one among them who had been waiting for the malicious little Nazi to put a foot wrong for decades. He hoped whichever of them it was who had sold Strucker the trick all those years ago was appropriately ashamed of themselves.

He glanced at Nat; she nodded, and raised her voice again, quelling the muttering.

“Speaking of SHIELD.”

Silence. Yelena crossed her arms over her chest. Something hot and worried was tangling knots in Bucky’s guts for the hundredth thousandth time that day alone. He swallowed more wine, and kept his face impassive and his hands steady.

“They’ve made – a discovery,” Natasha said. “Captain Steve Rogers was retrieved, alive, from the ruins of the Valkyrie a short while ago. Apparently the virus can put us into a kind of vegetative or hibernation state.”

There was a moment of astonished silence, during which most people turned to stare at Bucky, until Yelena said, “ _Us_?”

“The serum is the virus, apparently,” said Bucky. “There was never any mistake. Steve is one of us.”

“What the actual fuck,” someone said. Yelena sat down, staring. Bucky met all comers calmly, leaning on his elbows, fingers on his wine glass.

“No deal was broken,” he said. “Chronologically he’s the first of us, unless you count Schmidt. And needless to say, he has my protection. I’ll teach him what he needs to know, and I will vouch for him in this gathering.”

“And take the blame for his missteps?” Dot was sharp.

“Clean up after him, certainly,” said Bucky. “Old habits, and all that.”

“And Natasha?”

Natasha made to speak; Bucky beat her to it, panic sour in the back of his mouth. “Steve’s my friend,” he said. “My brother. If there’s responsibility for him being meted out, you’re not going to put it on anyone but me, and definitely not on my wife.”

Tasha had too much self-control to let her emotions show openly on her face, but, again: seventieth wedding anniversary, not that far off. Still, he was unrepentant. Most of the men looked approving; most of the women exasperated.

Yelena said, “Next year, he attends.”

Bucky bit the inside of his cheek. Steve would hate every second of these weekends, and make sure everyone here knew exactly how deeply he disapproved of it; he would not bother even trying to fit in, and probably would not care in the slightest that his life hinged on their acceptance of him. And Dot, damn her, said, “Of course,” and the agreement went around the room, making explicit what Bucky had known from the moment he’d seen the tell-tale gleam in Steve’s eyes in the hospital in New York: if Steve wanted to live, he would need to make himself one of them.

“Of course,” he echoed. What a mess, what a _mess_. Maybe a seventy-year sleep had made Steve more… more accepting.

Bucky doubted it.

“We’ll be there,” Natasha said, putting emphasis on the pronoun meant entirely for her husband.

+++

“That wasn’t fair,” she said later on, out on the balcony of their bedroom. They were supposed to be changing for the party. Bucky had got as far as swapping his slacks for jeans, and had been standing shirtless in the pleasant June night, smoking a cigarette and watching her move about the room through the open doors, until she’d come over to him. Her black underwear made her seem ghostly pale; she’d been trying to choose between the green and the black dress for ten minutes, too annoyed to make her mind up.

“What’s not fair is burdening you with my family,” he said. “Especially here.” Here, where the difference between toeing the line and breaking the rules meant death.

“I _married_ you,” Natasha said. “And maybe that piece of paper didn’t mean much beyond convenience to either of us when we did it, but it’s been sixty-seven years, Barnes.” Her bangles clattered when she put her hands on her hips.

“I know,” said Bucky. “You’re my _life_ , you think I hadn’t noticed?”

She blinked, her mouth pinching. Sometimes, when he said it out loud, especially if he said it out loud when they were fighting, she still got that half-afraid look, that moment of surprise, as if he were about to shout, _fooled you!_ and cut her throat. (One day, he swore, he’d invent a time-travel machine and go back to ’44 to brick her mother in the face.) It didn’t stop her counter-attacking with the ease of more than half a century’s practice. “Then let me share it,” she said.

“Look,” Bucky said. “You don’t – look. People have been telling you for seventy years that Steve was a saint, but he isn’t. He’s a stubborn, prideful, asshole son-of-a-bitch, with all due apologies to my Aunt Sarah. He won’t fit in here: he won’t try. He’ll make things as difficult as possible for himself, because he’s got _principles_.” He rolled his eyes. “I love him. He’s my best friend. But he’s not – he’s not a survivor. Not the way you and I are. I don’t know how far I can get him to compromise.”

“Oh, damn you anyway,” said Natasha. “You think I wouldn’t bother trying to help him if he weren’t your friend?”

“Of course you would. But I’m here, so you don’t have to.”

She pulled one of her bracelets off and threw it at his chest to relieve her feelings. Then another, and another. Bucky dropped his cigarette in the ashtray and darted forwards to catch her in his arms; Natasha pushed at him angrily.

“You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of you you give to me,” she hissed. “Everything you are is _mine_.”

“Christ,” Bucky said, strangled. “All I have ever been is yours.” He wanted to shake her till she saw sense sometimes, really he did.

“But apparently Steve has prior rights.”

“Are you _jealous_?”

“No!” she said, and then, “Yes,” and after that, “Stop pushing me out.”

“Fuck you,” Bucky said, “Steve’s –” Steve had been the only one who really understood him, when they were boys. The one friend who saw past the smart, smiling, dutiful son, the loving older brother who took care of everyone. Steve’s own arrogance and hurt pride had been a kind of challenge: _come on then, asshole, show me who you really are_ , an excuse, and a way out. Brother, best friend, comrade, even better half: over the years Bucky had struggled to put a name to what he’d lost the day he and Natasha had stumbled into the SSR camp and been told that the rumours about Captain America’s death were true. And now – a few hundred miles away Steve was rattling round Bucky’s house, alone, waiting for him and Natasha to get back, alive and well and struggling to adjust to what had happened to him. If Bucky thought about it too hard he felt sucker-punched, unbalanced, like a car that had gone skidding off the road into the bushes after being hit side-on by another vehicle. Alive, after seventy years; alive in spite of actually having _died_ , died because Bucky had let his guard down for an instant, had not been careful enough, had slipped up and let himself –

It must have shown on his face, because Natasha caught a hold of his chin and said, “It _wasn’t your fault_ ,” and Bucky flinched as if she’d struck him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said again. “It wasn’t ever your fault, any more than you falling from that train was his. When you’ve worked that novel concept through your stupid thick skull and admitted to yourself that you’ve got no right to shut me out like that –”

“What?” Bucky was hoarse. “What? Huh? What? Go back down to Yelena and the others and say they’re welcome to kill you in retaliation when Steve decides to re-order the world to his own judgements and damn the consequences? I won’t lose you! I won’t ever lose you.” He kissed her, because what the hell else was he supposed to do; kissed her till she moaned, till he was shaking, till they were stumbling, unsteady, across the room to the bed.

“I love you,” she gasped between hot kisses, her hands pulling at his jeans. “I love you. Now stop pushing me out.”

“I can’t,” said Bucky, breathless and incoherent. “I don’t know how to –” He didn’t know how to be Bucky Barnes, Howling Commando and Steve Rogers’ best friend, and Bucky Barnes, immortal vampire and Natasha Romanov’s husband, at one and the same time: that was the truth of it. Seventy years and a kind of death in a snowy ravine lay between those two men… he shuddered, all over, and she pushed him onto the mattress and climbed into his lap and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

“Shhh. You idiot.”

Bucky pressed his face against her shoulder, breathing deep. Perfume; toothpaste on her breath; the smell of her blood that had surrounded him for seventy years. Something hot and helpless and desperate was twisting in his chest, and he thought his hands were shaking; he clenched them against her bare back until he felt steady again.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, and meant it. “I’m sorry. That boy I was, he – he –”

“He was arrogant, and self-righteous, and a little naïve, and so badly hurt,” Natasha said softly. “And I loved him with my whole heart, and he loved me…”

“Don’t you ever make it sound like I stopped. Not ever.”

“No. But that girl I was doesn’t really exist anymore, either.”

At last he sighed, and kissed her collar-bone, the side of her neck. Shut her out? He’d rather – well, die.  She was right; she really was right. He wasn’t the man Steve remembered anymore, and Steve would have to live with that: but so would Bucky himself. Just because Steve was home didn’t mean there was any going back.

But he’d hate this. There was no way around it. He had lied to Bucky for nearly three years about what he was, about something that had fundamentally changed his very nature, and he’d tried to go on lying to him, in the hospital, and that made Bucky feel – not betrayed, not exactly; he knew, even better than Steve did, the price they paid for what they were; but – unsure. And he kept thinking of the look on Steve’s face after he’d fed in the club in New York: the disgust and the self-loathing. What would Steve do, carrying that around with him during peacetime, when there was no alternative to dying but to take what you needed from innocents? Would he take one look at this place, at the others gathered here, at the servers, the deal, their decades-long tolerance of men like Strucker in exchange for peace, and condemn it?

Probably, yes. The real question was, would he try and stop it; and that was a question Bucky no longer had an answer to. The real question was, what would Bucky do if Steve –

He didn’t have an answer for that, either. All he knew was that he loved the stupid kid, and he loved Natasha, and he’d die before he saw either of them hurt.

“Tasha,” he said softly. “My Natalia.” He leaned back so he could kiss her, hold her close and kiss her and breathe her scent, feel her strong body hot and soft and moving in his arms, alive, loving, his. “I love you. I’m sorry. I really am. But you have to let me carry whatever consequences to the others here. Please, sweetheart. Please don’t put yourself in the crosshairs like that.”

Natasha sighed too. She cupped his face in her hands and studied him earnestly for long silent moments, while Bucky held her and looked up into those gorgeous eyes and hoped she saw – everything.

“Please,” he said again. “I’m the only one who’s got a hope in hell of getting through to Steve when he’s stuck on something, and even I can’t always make him listen. Don’t put yourself in the middle of this –”

“Of what? Nothing’s happened.”

“Yet,” Bucky said. “Just. Call me paranoid. But please be careful. It’s not just them, is it? There’s Nick, and SHIELD, and that whole stupid Initiative…”

“Paranoid, all right,” she said. “All right.” She kissed his temple, the tip of his nose. “Just this once.”

“My love.” Bucky kissed her again, giddy with relief, sweet and hot and wet, till she shivered and squirmed in his lap, laughing.

“That’s better.”

He laughed too. “Yeah. Hate fighting with you.” Relief made him giddy, and the gladness of having made her understand, at least a little, even more so. He was downright exuberant. He didn’t know whether he wanted to waltz her round the room or lay her out on the bed and kiss her lovely cunt till he’d brought her off so many times she passed out with it.

“Stop provoking it,” she said sternly, meaning their fights, and kissed the tip of his nose again, and his cheekbones, and the cleft in his chin, and finally his mouth; he rubbed his tongue against hers, gently took her bottom lip between his teeth, longing for her taste. Even as he did so the music started, somewhere downstairs, shaking through the house, beckoning. There were footsteps in the corridors and voices, and Bucky felt Natasha stir, rocking her body back and forth to the distant beat that was slowly gathering speed and strength below. He kissed her chin, her jaw, his mind made up at once.

“Let’s go downstairs. Let’s dance.”

She bit her lip. “OK.” But she kissed him instead of sliding off his lap, and he mussed her hair for her until it looked like she’d just climbed out of bed, and when she did finally stand up he was starting to get hard. Oh, this was going to be fun, he could feel it, he could taste it. She tilted his chin up with her fingers so he was gazing up into her face, and rubbed her thumb over his mouth as he grinned at her. Her own lush lips were curving into a smile.

“Downstairs,” she said. “Wear that black shirt, with the v-neck… leave your watch off, and that.” The leather cuff on his right wrist, she meant, the one that hid the scars of her teeth the way her bangles hid the scars of his. Bucky licked his lips and parted them, drew her thumb inside his mouth and sucked on it, and smiled to see her shiver. Her bangles clattered again when she touched his face with her other hand, and that reminded him.

“Bought you something when we were in London,” he said.

“Presents!” Natasha laughed, and Bucky stood up and took her shoulders and turned her firmly around, leaving her standing in front of the mirror while he rummaged in his bag, pretending to fix her hair.

“Wear the black,” he said. “Here.” He stepped up behind her and took hold of her wrist, sliding the bracelet over her hand and snapping the heavy loop shut with a click like a manacle closing. Bracelet and reflection glittered in the light, and lust shivered through him, looking at their half-naked reflections, the fall of her hair, the scars they both bore.

Natasha was delighted. “It’s beautiful!” She leaned against him and turned her head up to kiss his jaw, smiling.

“I’m glad you like it.” Bucky kissed her shoulder, the nape of her neck, ran his hands down her flanks to her hips, watching the shadows on her skin in the mirror. Pull a chair over; sit down and spread her over his lap; bring her off without even bothering to get her naked, make her watch herself writhe… he brushed his fingers over her panties, and she flicked his knuckles punishingly.

“Dancing _first_. Where did you get it?” She lifted her hand up, admiring the light on the curve of the bracelet, tracing a fingertip over the curling engravings.

“I’m not telling you _that_ ,” Bucky said. “You’d go back yourself and buy up the whole shop, and Christmas this year would drive me to despair.” He smiled to himself when she started laughing.

“Natalia,” he murmured. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“Hey,” Natasha said softly, and drew his hand up to kiss his palm. “Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about it now. This weekend… it’s just for us, OK?”

“OK,” Bucky said. “OK.”

+++

Decorous was not the word for any of their gatherings, but even by their standards the first night was always the worst. Or best, depending on your point of view...  Natasha already felt a little sorry for the clean-up crews.

She always wondered what sort of conference the owners thought was underway during these weekends. This house was old and ivy-hung and private, set in a tree-lined park that hid the building from the outside world, three-storied, with wide open spaces on the ground floor where some enterprising former owner had knocked a few walls down, leaving rooms huge as ballrooms where none such had been originally intended. The floors were marble and polished wood, gleaming in the pulsating lights, the French windows tall, the furniture old and dark and heavy. When they got downstairs, Natasha leaning lazily on James’ arm, the candles were gone and the lights dimmed; people were swaying to the beat already, drinking and laughing, and the servers were weaving through the crowd with more drinks… and, of course, themselves. More than one was already bleeding.

“Champagne?” James said, and kissed her hand before he moved away to pick her up a glass. Natasha watched him, smiling a little, watched the broad shoulders and the square jaw and the deft, clever hands, the long back and perfect ass and strong thighs. She so hated fighting with him. Her partner; her best friend; her husband. What a hellish couple of days. He’d never not talked to her about anything before. The one thing they had each always been able to do was tell the other the truth, and know themselves understood… She’d given him the trick, loved him and married him and lived with him for sixty-seven years, and all it took was one pretty blond with a few memories attached for him to become someone – what, whom she no longer knew? That wasn’t right. But she hadn’t expected his little speech at dinner, either. They had been equals in everything they had undertaken together since 1945.

Damn him anyway. What was he so afraid of? Steve was much too preoccupied with himself at the moment to make trouble for anyone. He had barely managed to ask about or understand the history of SHIELD; it hurt him every time when Peggy’s name came up. Then again, Natasha knew her husband, inside and out, and she knew what kind of person he most respected, most admired: self-righteous assholes who couldn’t let anything go, who struggled to compromise what they felt was right even in the name of necessity…

Qualities, in short, that he didn’t possess himself. Natasha let the party swirl them apart: she talked and laughed and drank and danced with the best of them, and worried with at least seventy percent of her mind about her husband. All right. Say he was right. What sort of trouble could or would Steve possibly cause?

Strucker. Steve would put up with a lot – would see the sense in the deal – was kind enough, compassionate enough, to understand the position of all of them who’d fled the KGB. He would not tolerate Strucker, trick or no trick. Or Reinhardt, or any other member of Hydra; and probably not more than half the people who’d bought the trick, either.

And suddenly Natasha thought, _and why should he?_ Was there anyone here who didn’t actively hate Strucker? And yet they’d knuckled under and tolerated him for decades rather than provoke a conflict which might – might! – expose them to the world, or draw the attention of organisations more powerful than SHIELD, whom neither Natasha nor James nor anyone else held any influence with.

Anyone would think they were not, in fact, the best-trained and most dangerous soldiers in the world, the way they all jumped at shadows over government organisations who… So all right. Their experiences were not conducive to building much trust in that direction. Hell, even Howard had deliberately and callously lied to Natasha and James for forty years, give or take, and they had both trusted Howard…

Still. Jumping at shadows; fearing the past repeating itself, and utterly forgetting that none of them were those frightened young conscripts anymore… Which was ironic, given that they didn’t usually let themselves forget what they were. _We’ve been living like this for half a century_ , Natasha thought, _isolated, self-important, borderline delusional in some cases…_ Take these weekends: the manor houses, the half-naked servers, the expense and the debauchery. For god’s sake, she thought, slipping past Ksenia feeding from a lovely girl in red to reach the bar and pour herself another glass of champagne, if this was just about policing themselves they could just as easily have a teleconference every other week. Instead they threw an orgy once a year.

She snagged herself a bar stool and dragged it back into the shadows a little so she could perch there undisturbed and drink, watching the intoxicated crowd and the flickering lights and the servers, near-naked, swaying with drink and blood loss and the ecstasy of being fed from. Some of them came back year after year to experience this… Natasha could sympathise. She thought they were fools – it was infinitely more dangerous for them than for her – but oh the sweet sublime helplessness of it, the warm lassitude that weighed your limbs down, the blanket of pleasure that laid itself over your thoughts… There was nothing in the world like lying safe in James’s arms and having him feed from her.

A little shiver took her when she spied him on the dance floor with Dot. His sudden laugh, the lazy graceful movements took all her attention for a moment or ten, and Natasha shifted on the bar stool, aware she was getting turned on. When was the last time she’d gotten her hands on him? When was the last time she’d gotten her hands on him and known their audience would not be bothered by anything they did? Steve was a sweetheart, but she and James hadn’t had houseguests in thirty years at least. Now she came to think of it, it was no wonder he was so wound up. 

Her bracelets clanked when she reached for the champagne bottle again, sliding down her arms and catching her eye. God, those lovely scars he put on her… Steve spent half his time trying not to stare at them, which was both a little disturbing and a little arousing. He really was a sweetheart. An asshole, just as James had said earlier, but a delightful one. It was impossible not to respect someone who tried so hard to do the right thing, who could excoriate himself but believed in others so much.

What would this crowd make of him. Be baffled, and then angry, and then – who knew.

She understood them, she supposed. When everything else you’d ever had or believed in had been ripped away from you, piece by piece, by war and dictatorships and time; and when you were faced with the prospect of living this way for eternity, unchanged and unchanging, not exactly the undead of story but no more capable of truly integrating into human communities for all that, your perspective on life tended to become a little skewed. But they couldn’t keep going like this forever. It was stagnation – very pretty stagnation, admittedly, but stagnation just the same.

And if anyone could get away with changing it, it would be Steve: newly awake, and unfamiliar with the entire world he found himself in, let alone their insular little community. His credentials were impeccable too. They would not like him any more than they liked James, but they would respect him as a fellow-soldier. Natasha tapped her fingers on the champagne bottle and poured herself yet another glass, grinning.

Let him have his head, then. James wouldn’t like it, but James did not like uncertainties, full stop. He wanted careful plans, strategies, definite outcomes… his personal philosophy, if he ever bothered to formulate it, would probably be “do no harm”. Natasha herself was of the more pragmatic opinion that you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Drop Steve into this little pool and see what ripples it caused. Oh yes. She was looking forwards to it already. They could do with a bit of shaking up, the lot of them. Blow away the cobwebs, give them something outside of themselves to focus on.

Excellent. She felt much, much better for that decision. She’d have to convince James to let it alone, but she could do that. He would see the sense in it eventually. And he had a fair point. They couldn’t handle Nick’s ridiculous Initiative and the others here at the same time. Care would have to be taken, timing planned exactly. But that was possible. Anything was possible.

Who knew – one might easily be made to sabotage the other. Did Nick know Captain America was a vampire? Natasha grinned to herself. And they had to get Banner off that candidate list pronto. Monsters were one thing, but monsters who couldn’t be controlled –!

Oh yes. All sorts of possibilities. Natasha felt a little smug about her decision, on the whole. All right, a lot smug. She set the champagne bottle down with a brisk little movement and jumped to her feet, straightening her dress, delighted with herself. Business concluded – now for pleasure. Such pleasures. Just imagining them made her shiver. And the music had changed too, the mood of the party had subtly shifted. They had drunk and talked and laughed and danced, and now, as midnight passed and the night grew deeper, there was only one thing left: to feed.  

And, the two urges inseparable for all of them here, to fuck.

Tanya had snagged herself a pretty blond boy Natasha thought she’d seen here before, the blood dark against his pale skin; Sasha was pouring drinks and talking to Yelena, who was licking her own red fingers and laughing; Dot was on the dance floor still, beckoning to a lovely girl with dark eyes and a full mouth. A score of faces Natasha knew flashed at her through the dim lights and the darkness and then vanished again into the gyrating crowd. The music had a beat that pounded in time with her heart, and she realised as she walked that the champagne had gone very much to her head...

She danced a few chords with Sasha, laughing, and then with Yelena, and kissed Dot’s cheek on her way past, searching the dance floor until she found the man she wanted. James gave her a once-over that made her a little weak in the knees, licking his lips and smiling as he slid his arm around her waist. Natasha let him pull her close, sighing when he kissed her upturned mouth. He tasted of champagne and cigarette smoke, and Natasha pressed against him, laughing, pushing him back step by step off the dance floor and towards the nearest couch, where he sprawled with his legs spread and drew her down to kiss her again.

Talking was overrated. All the talking was done: the last few days’ distance was gone as if it had never been, and Natasha lay draped lasciviously across her husband’s lap and let him pour her more champagne and caress her, nuzzling at his jaw, breathing his lovely warm iron-ish smell, feeling the beat of his pulse under her lips… Already the air was thick with the smell of blood and sweat; and, slowly, of sex.

Bare skin and low moans in the other corner, barely audible at all, and the dancers were all over each other, skirts rucking up, shirts coming undone, hands in flies. She couldn’t stop touching his exposed scars, stroking the damaged skin, scraping her teeth across his wrists, making him shiver. He was mouthing at her neck, merest brush of lips, his right hand caressing her bare throat as if he needed to touch her scars too…

Time had spun out into honey, sweet and slow-moving. The only real thing in the world was James’ body: his hands, his mouth, his thighs underneath her, his muscled chest hot through his thin shirt, his breath on her skin, his touch at her scars. Every now and then a server would come up to them and offer themselves up, the soft bare skin an invitation, the smell of their blood heady and rich with intoxicants, their eyes wild with want. Natasha sent them all away with a smile and a flick of her fingers. Not tonight, darlings, tempting as you are… she was not in a mood tonight to take anyone’s blood but his. Her darling boy… if she’d stayed more human than the others here, over the decades, if she’d been able to retain some sense of distance from the monster she knew she was, if she’d prevented it driving her entirely insane, it was because he’d been there for her to love. She kissed his smiling lovely mouth until he shivered beneath her, until she was breathless with lust herself, and gasped when he rubbed his hands in the crease of her hips, pressing close to her cunt; she writhed, moaning, and felt the exact moment he realised she’d taken her panties off before they left their suite. He jerked against her, shuddering, and growled, a hot, possessive little noise that made her laugh with delight.

“Oh love, I’m yours. Leaving? Or here?” They’d stayed before, dancing and drinking and fucking here with all the others, and Natasha found she didn’t care which option they chose as long as she got James’ blood in her mouth and his cock inside her sometime very, very soon.

“Leaving,” he said, and kissed her again. “Have you all to myself.”

Natasha grinned. It was sweet to be alone with James again, to be as indulgent with each other as they wanted. One day, she swore to herself, she’d peel that self-loathing of Steve’s off of him layer by layer and make him admit just how _good_ it could feel to be what they were... and oh it felt good. She twined her arms around James’ neck and nuzzled at his throat again, feeling stubble faint against her skin, licking at his scars, not quite daring to bite down: if she did he’d have her here on the couch, probably. Lay her down and spread her legs and sink inside her, bare his throat to her when he bent over her body. Everyone would watch, and everyone would know he was _hers_.

For a moment the thought just hovered in her mind. Then she bit down. His hot blood filled her mouth, tangy, spicy, her favourite taste in all the world, and it was like drinking undiluted sunshine, all warmth and golden glory, and the way he went lax underneath her, groaning her name, was really just the icing on the cake.

Natasha raised her head from his throat and licked her lips luxuriously, smiling down into those dazed grey eyes. James slid his hand up her back and pushed his fingers into her hair; they kissed and kissed and kissed like horny teenagers, dizzy and turned-on and drunk, her fingers flexing on his chest, threatening to scratch. When Natasha rocked against him she could feel him hard in his pants, and the smell of his blood filled her head completely.

“Upstairs,” she murmured, “upstairs, upstairs.”

“No no no no no,” said James dangerously; he was pulling at his belt with one hand and gathering her dress up at her hip with the other. “You finish what you started, kid…”

“You should be so lucky,” Natasha said, yanking his hands out of the way and kneeling up, pulling them both into position so that when she sank down again she was straddling him just right, the denim of his jeans rubbing deliciously rough against her bare thighs, her cunt, “you’re _mine_ ,” viciously, and kissed him, possessive, ripping his lip open with her teeth and tasting his blood again.

“I don’t know how you dare pretend you’ve ever doubted that.” They were barely moving, his arms were too tight around her, the music so loud they barely heard each other, the dim flickering lights made Natasha dizzy, a clatter next to them when Mikhail stumbled into a table with one of the servers, both of them laughing, till he bent the girl over it and pulled her skirt up round her hips; then it was all moans and grunts and the wet noise of him fucking her. Natasha was playing with James’ hair, rocking her hips minutely over his; his mouth was swollen beautifully, hanging open a little, but his eyes were sharp again.

“You want something?” he murmured, a little challenging, and Natasha slid her hands down over his shoulders and pressed her thumbs against his throat, feeling his pulse jump, watching the blood run over his skin.

“No,” she said, all innocence, and bent her head to lick him clean. “I have… well, pretty much everything.” She let her teeth graze his skin; pressed herself against him, and revelled in his shudder. The hard line of his cock was pressing beautifully against her cunt, her slick probably smearing over his jeans. She could rub off on him like this, exactly like this. It would probably make him come in his pants. “See?”

James sighed, slow and delighted, and turned his face up to be kissed. She could feel the tension in his thighs and arms, the strain of holding still for her when she knew perfectly well that all he wanted to do was lay her on this stupid couch and fuck her… Natasha brushed kisses over his face and sucked on that pouty lower lip and rubbed their noses together as she teased him. The smell of sex and fresh blood was growing thicker; nearly everyone was moaning, probably… Were they being watched? They were probably being watched. Mikhail had yanked the girl up onto her tiptoes and bitten into her neck, her hands flying out, her face twisted with ecstasy as a trail of blood ran down over her breast; Natasha had to look away, shivering, remembering the times she and James had fucked that way. When he realised where her gaze had landed he laughed softly, moving against her, and she kissed him punishingly, making him moan.

“Keep me here all night?”

“If you want.” She grinned.

His eyes darkened. “You know what I want.”

“You’ve been an absolute pain in the ass for a week straight,” Natasha said.

James’ turn to grin. “Baby, I’m sorry, but I didn’t bring the strap-on.”

Natasha made a ridiculous noise against his shoulder that was mostly an attempt to strangle a laugh, and James slid his hands down her back to cup her ass, groping her through the thin material of her dress. When she writhed and pressed back into his grip he slid his hands down further still, curling in around the tops of her thighs, his fingertips brushing her cunt; she kissed him again, moaning unsteadily. Decades later he still always made that lovely noise when he found her wet for him, the same possessive noise he’d made when he realised she wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Now or never,” he growled, a lovely rasp in her ear. “Either we go upstairs or I have you _right now_.”

Oh, the payoff for teasing him was infinitely worth it. Natasha squirmed against him, laughing, and kissed the shell of his ear. “Upstairs,” she whispered. Have him all to herself, oh yes.

James didn’t bother letting her stand. He just changed his grip on her thighs and got to his feet himself, forcing her to wind her arms around his neck and hook her legs over his hips. He could have carried her with one arm and no help at all from her – he could have fucked her like that – but she was dizzy with champagne and lust and bloodlust, and it was much easier to kiss and kiss and kiss him as he crossed the room, avoiding other couples more by luck than skill. Dot was sprawled in an armchair being eaten out, her mouth red, lavishing praise on the girl kneeling at her feet; there was an indistinct threesome by the door –

“Leaving so soon?” Yelena, licking her fingers clean and smiling at them, mellow with blood and orgasm, and her eyes swept over them, appraising, inviting.

“Fraid so,” said James. His voice had dropped to that husky pitch that made Natasha’s insides melt, and she stroked the hair at the back of his neck and drew deep lungfuls of the lovely smell of his blood. “My lovely wife has plans.”

“Indeed she does,” Natasha murmured. He’s mine, mine, mine... she’d not cared much earlier, but by now she had come down, firmly and irrevocably, on the side of _no one else gets to see what I’m about to do to him_. “Good night, Yelena.”

Yelena glanced round the room and grinned. “Oh it will be.”

+++

The stairs proved impossible, just impossible. Maybe if Natasha had been able to stop kissing him… A drunken laughing stumble, knocking into walls and bannisters, hands all over each other, half their clothes dangling off them… when the door finally fell to behind them James caught Natasha’s wrists and stripped her bracelets from her hands, trailing them across the soft carpet as he backed her into the table in the middle of the little sitting room, the vase of flowers rattling on it, and then he went to his knees at her feet and said, “Madame,” the way the servers always did, and sank his teeth into her wrist.

Natasha cried out, her head falling back and her body arching with pleasure, her skin hot, her mind spinning delightfully, all her existence concentrated on the hot lovely pain in her wrist, his soft lips on her skin, the suction of his mouth. When her knees gave out he leaned back and gathered her into his lap again, laughing when she pulled his shirt off his shoulders and smeared her blood across his chest.

“Love you. Oh, god, Tasha, Natalia, please. Please.”

Flat on his back, hands clenched in the carpets; she knelt over him, licked and sucked his nipple, ran her tongue along the curve of his pectoral, and then bit down. James arched up underneath her with a frantic shout, and oh his hot blood in her mouth, how _good_ he tasted, how lovely this was. Drunk on him, she sat up, laughing, and he reached up and pulled her hair out of its knot, scattering pins as it tumbled over her shoulders, brushing the tops of her breasts.

“I love you,” she said as he pulled her down to lick her mouth and chin clean of his blood, “oh I love you.”

“Bed,” James said dizzily. “Bed, bed, bed.”

There was yet another champagne bottle in a cooler by the bed, and the sheets were crisp and warm, a collection of candles on the dresser which they didn’t bother with, flinging the windows open for the moonlight. The music from downstairs thudded dully through the room, almost like a heartbeat, and as often happened when they were drunk, when they had taken from each other a little too much, the night began to blur around the edges beautifully, trancelike, unreal, ecstatic. Pale skin and shadows; fall of hair and smear of blood black on white. Throat, wrists, thighs, chest: his body was littered with the marks of her teeth, as hers was with his, and Natasha set herself to tracing them, darkly possessive, while he twisted under her and moaned and begged. Every bite made him cry out, and when she finally sank onto his cock and fucked him to orgasm he lay limp and pliant under her body, half in a daze, his lovely eyes hooded and his mouth curled into a smile.

“Feel better?” James muttered when she’d collapsed across his chest. Even fuck-drunk and close to passing out the man had a mouth on him. Natasha pressed her fingers against a sluggishly bleeding bite mark on his ribs, making him groan.

“Did I tell you to stop shutting me out?”

“You did.” He pulled her closer, if that were possible, and kissed the top of her head. They must have dozed for a little while; the next thing Natasha knew, the moonlight had moved down the bed, and she was lying on her side, cradled in the curve of his arm, her leg over his hip, and he was hard again and pushing inside her.

“Wake up, sweetheart,” James was murmuring against her skin, “wake up, my darling, I want you and I want you to feel every second,” and he gathered her up and bit sweetly into the flesh at the top of her breast. Natasha made an inhuman noise, her hands digging into his shoulders, twisting like a mad thing as he fucked her, begging for more. When they kissed the taste of her blood in his mouth drove her crazy. For a moment she was confused when he rolled them over and knelt up, reaching out to fumble with something –

The champagne was icy on her chest, pooling in the hollow below her throat and stinging deliciously in the bite at her breast, so that Natasha was squirming and ripping his shoulders up when he licked it off luxuriously slow and then sank his teeth into her throat. Pleasure flashed up and swallowed her, leaving her gasping, and she felt him laugh against her throat; then he pushed up again and lifted the bottle and poured more over her breasts, licking them clean too, lovely hot strokes of his tongue till he took her nipple into his mouth and worried and sucked it, one after the other, pouring and licking and sucking till the bottle was empty and Natasha was as loose-limbed and lust-drunk as he’d been earlier. The last thing she remembered about the night with any real clarity was his hot weight pressing her into the mattress, his breathing by her ear, both of them still shaking with orgasm.

+++

Bucky was sore all over when he woke up, the sun in his eyes and a warm breeze over his body. He groaned a little, feeling aches and pains all over, little twinges of hurt that brought last night back to him very, very vividly. He was still lying mostly on top of Natasha, her face tucked against his shoulder, his knee between hers, and he laughed to himself as he looked down their bodies and saw the bruises and the bite marks and the smears of blood. Her skin was still sticky where he’d poured the champagne over her… It had been a long time since they’d been so mad with each other. He turned his head to kiss her hair, stroked his hand down her flank. She stirred; he kissed her hair again.

“Sweetheart…”

“Mmm. Morning.”

“Hi.” Bucky stroked her hair from her face and kissed her lax swollen mouth good morning. “Bath?”

Her thin hands touched his face; she smiled at him, bleary with sleep. “Breakfast in bed?”

He kissed the tip of her nose, and she leaned up and kissed him properly. Oh, baths could wait, breakfast could wait… he settled down again beside her, his eyes half-closed against the sun, drifting in and out of a doze, until a knock on the door shattered their peace. Natasha buried her head under the pillows, groaning, and Bucky rolled out of bed with a thump. God, the door to the suite was miles away. He staggered a little on unsteady legs, thinking with a grimace that it might be good for both of them to feed from someone other than each other… their clothes were scattered across the floor, and Natasha’s bangles shimmered in the carpet. Underwear. No. OK. Jeans. Aha. That would do.

It was one of the servers – the blond boy – with a cartful of breakfast. Bacon and eggs, and hot toast, and coffee, and underneath the smell of strawberries and apples. Bucky breathed it in in delight. The boy was looking at him, somewhere between horrified and impossibly turned on, and Bucky stepped to the side and waved him in, smiling a bit.

“Madame Yelena felt that you would prefer breakfast up here,” the boy said. Faint French accent, Bucky thought.

“She doesn’t want to look at me over the breakfast table, she means,” he said, laughing a little. “Thank you.” And then, after a moment, considering how unsteady he was and how much blood he’d taken from Natasha last night – god, the way she’d writhed when he poured the champagne over her lovely tits, how her thighs had clamped tight round his waist when he drank from her – he swallowed his scruples and said, “Come on through.”

The boy’s face lit up. Probably the thing Bucky found most disturbing about the servers was the idea that any normal human would want this, would enjoy having their blood taken the way he and Natasha enjoyed it. Humans were supposed to be more, well, more human, than that.

Anyway. He followed the kid back into the bedroom and grinned when the boy stopped short, staring at the view: Natasha sprawled across the bed, the sheets tangled artfully around her, her hair red as blood against the white fabric, her lovely skin marked and smudged with fingerprint-bruises and reddened bite marks and smears of blood. Bucky wanted to catch the boy by the throat and drain him for looking at her; he wanted to walk across the room and kiss her, tangle his hands in her hair, make her squirm and sigh and scream for him while the boy watched and ate his heart out, and when he looked at her –

Natasha was looking at him, eyes bright, a little smile on her lips that said, _I know exactly what you’re thinking, my darling_. The way she watched him as she beckoned to the boy said, _when he’s gone you do whatever you want to me_.

Bucky licked his lips and smiled back.

The kid knelt at the bedside; his breathing was quick and his pupils dilated, arousal painted all over his face. Natasha took his hand in hers and lowered her head, and Bucky turned his attention to the lines of her body, the way her skin flushed and the bruises cleared and the little cuts and bite marks healed as she drank. The kid was moaning, a distracting, annoying little noise. Bucky couldn’t blame him. God, that mouth on him, her teeth in his skin, the pleasure she’d twisted out of him last night, the pleasure she’d taken in holding him down and putting marks of ownership into his skin. He shuddered, watching her, wanting her. There was yet more champagne on the breakfast cart, and Bucky went over to pour two glasses; his hands weren’t too unsteady. At last she sat up, the sheets falling down around her waist, and the boy swayed when she released him, sighing, shivering.

“Enough,” she said gently. “Go on to bed.”

“Madame,” he said, punch-drunk and stumbling as he rose. “But Sir –”

Natasha’s fingers twitched. Bucky bit down a grin. “Sir likes having her marks on him,” he said, and smiled at him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the way Natasha relaxed against the pillows; she was about ready to purr with contentment. “Thank you for that.”

“Run along, darling,” Natasha said when he still hesitated, and finally the boy nodded and went. Bucky handed one of the glasses to Natasha, and sat on the edge of the bed to toast her.

“There’s everything,” he said.

“That’s suspiciously nice of Yelena.”

“We’ll pay for it later, I’m sure.”

Natasha didn’t dispute it. She sipped her champagne and smiled at him in silence, her eyes on him avid, admiring, warm as a touch.

Bucky said, “Will I have to starve, to preserve these?” He twisted his wrist to show the fresh wounds.

“Oh love no,” Natasha said. “It’s just that, this weekend, I don’t want you drinking from anyone but me.”

“Oh!” he said, his eyes lingering on her lovely breasts, the swing of her hips, her clever hands. “What a chore.”

Natasha laughed, and then she put her champagne glass down on the bedside table and beckoned to him. Bucky pulled the sheets off her so the sunlight glowed on her lovely skin, and he caught her knees in his hands and spread her thighs, hot with anticipation. There: the knot of scar tissue on her left thigh where he’d fed from her the first time, the very first time, safe in their mansion.

“May I?”

“Not too much,” Natasha said. She was getting wet, her cunt swelling open; Bucky made to caress her, and she dug her nails into his hand. A little more pressure and she’d break the skin. “You like those marks, make sure you keep them.”

“You’re a possessive little witch,” he said, amused and turned on all at once.

“I know,” Natasha said happily.

By the time they got round to the food the bacon and eggs had gone cold.

+++

“If Nick offers him a place with the Initiative,” Natasha said. They’d stopped for gas and a cup of coffee, and beyond the little village the wooded hills rose up calm and welcoming in the haze; the sun was climbing and the morning mists were dissipating, and the road wound its way into the trees and up the hillsides in long loops, sunlight flicking over them through the canopy of leaves, the wind in her face a lovely wake up. Her hair would be a mess by the time they got home.  

James, sprawled in the passenger seat with his sunglasses on, turned his head to look at her. “He’ll take it,” he said. He was deliciously hoarse still, and the thin t-shirt didn’t do much to hide the marks on him. He’d picked it very deliberately; he was flaunting her bruises because he knew it would make her happy. Sometimes she loved him so much it was a physical ache in her chest. (Steve would see them, and probably be shocked.) 

“Are you sure?” She frowned a little. “It’s such a bad idea. He must see that.”

“I told you, darling, you don’t know him. It’s tailor-made to stomp on all his neuroses. Saving people, doing good…”

“Hmmph!” Natasha said.

“You were right,” said James. “Damage control.”

Hmmph. Natasha was starting to think that maybe a little less damage control would do everyone the world of good.

“So we sit him down and explain everything –”

“And then sit on him till the initial reaction passes.”

“Which will be?”

“Oh years later, probably.”

“I meant the initial reaction.”

“Oh I see.” James sighed. “Honestly? Probably disgust. And a healthy side-order of anger. Strucker’s a problem. I mean the blood drinking – he _hates_ himself for it, Tasha – the blood drinking and the orgies and the servers are also problems, but mostly I think Strucker.”

“Yes, I guessed that.” Natasha tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “Strucker’s always been a problem.”

James took his sunglasses off, squinting at her suspiciously. “What are you up to?”

Natasha grinned. “Not sure yet.”

“Oh lord,” he said grumpily.

“Trust me.” She leaned over the gearstick and patted his knee comfortingly. It had done him good to get out of the house. Hard to process your dead best friend’s astonishing resurrection properly when said best friend was living in your home; sometimes you needed a little distance for these things.

Besides, he was so much more relaxed and reasonable now she’d fucked him stupid a time or two. To be fair, she felt the same way herself. Houseguests. No matter how you loved them they inevitably brought that problem with them.

“You should be so lucky,” he said. “I know you, kid.”

“What an absolutely unwarranted –” Natasha said, breaking off into laughter. “I promise I’ll be careful.”  

“Sure,” he said. “That’s your watchword.”

Natasha leaned over to thump him, and James caught her hand and kissed it, and the road wound on before them, leading them home.

 

 


End file.
